


3.12 Telenovela

by William_Easley



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: F/M, Haunting, Humor, Investigation, Ramirez family history, Teen Romance, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-29
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-14 13:57:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 24,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14137428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/William_Easley/pseuds/William_Easley
Summary: The story is in English. Something new is haunting Gravity Falls; they seem to be little balls of glowing pale-blue light. Pretty harmless sounding, maybe, but maybe . . . a threat. Anyway, they make one huge mistake. They come between Abuelita and her favorite TV shows!Some humor, some adventure, and some Wendip.





	1. Canciónita

**Author's Note:**

> Gravity Falls is the property of the Walt Disney Company and the show's creator, Alex Hirsch. I do not own the show or any of the characters, and I earn no money from writing these stories. I do that for my own enjoyment and, I hope, to amuse fans of the series.

**Telenovela**

**By William Easley**

**(August 7, 2015)**

* * *

**1: Canciónita**

Rosa Ramirez liked the summer afternoons best, after the gift shop and the lunch room had settled in, after she could relax and take up the baby, little Harmony Rose, and give her a bottle of her mother's milk and rock her and sing to her.

She sang a song that, back in Mexico, her own mother had sung to her, and that she, in turn, had sung to her daughters and her grandchildren, and now to her great granddaughter:

* * *

_Los pollitos dicen,_

_pío, pío, pío_

_cuando tienen hambre_

_cuando tienen frío_

_La gallina busca,_

_el maíz y el trigo_

_les da la comida_

_y les presta abrigo._

_Bajo sus dos alas,_

_acurrucaditos_

_duermen los pollitos_

_hasta el otro día._

* * *

It was only a lullaby, a little song, but babies liked it. The words meant, "The little chicks say 'peep, peep, peep' when they're hungry or when they're cold. Then the mama hen finds corn and wheat for them to eat, and she settles warm over them. Cuddled warm beneath her wings, the little chicks sleep until the next day comes."

Rocking Harmony Rose as she took her bottle—no baby was ever so serious, so grave, about drinking her milk as Harmony Rose was, though she laughed and smiled at all other times—Abuelita (for that was what everyone called her) could not help smiling herself, remembering that her grandson Soos's very first word had not been "Mama" or "Papa" or even "Abuelita," but "Peep!" He had loved the little song, too.

Doctor Pines and Dipper came through, talking earnestly. "I've seen them before," Dr. Pines was saying. "They're not  _ignis fatuus_ or—"

Abuelita said, "Shh, shh,  _por favor_. You keep the baby awake."

"Sorry," Dr. Pines whispered. "Come on, Mason, and we'll do some research. I think I have an offprint of an article by Dr. Allenby, who pioneered this field of investigation—"

Murmuring, they went through the parlor and into the gift shop, from where they would doubtlessly open the secret door and descend into the basement. Harmony Rose had finished the bottle. "What a good  _chica_!" Abuelita said, and she burped the baby, who gave a trademark Ramirez  _braaaap!_ Then she chuckled and gurgled.

And, good little girl that she was, within five minutes she had fallen asleep. Abuelita carefully rose up from the rocking chair and carried the child to her own nursery, laid her in the crib, and made sure the baby monitor was on. Then the old lady went to her room, the room that Soos had added to the Mystery Shack especially for her, though she had protested no, no, no, she did not need a fine room like that.

But Soos was such a good grandson! He had built it with his own hands, and he and Melody had carefully furnished it with her old bed (but a new mattress, so comfortable!) and all her family photographs on the wall, along with the crucifix, a nice round mirror so she could check her hair, and the television so she could always watch her favorite telenovelas. Above the set hung her framed certificate of naturalization.

Whenever she noticed it, Rosa remembered her girlhood days, when she had lived on a big farm and had no dreams beyond the next day. How that had changed! Smiling, Abuelita thought that her own life had been like a telenovela, one with a glad beginning, a sad middle, and a happier ending.

She had been born Rosa Alzamirano on a fine farm not far from Tepic—most people from the USA thought of Mexico as a desert kind of country, but where she came from was rainforest and lush and green, with deep, fertile soil, wonderful land for growing crops. She was the youngest of four sisters and had one younger brother.

Her father's farm had grown maize, beans, and peanuts, avocados, melons of all kinds, peppers, tomatoes—and when he had died of a heart attack, far too young, she remembered how half the people of the district had come to his funeral, so many that most of them had to stand respectfully outside the church. He had been a good man.

Then, not long after her father died, when she was really far too young, barely sixteen, she married Hernan Ramirez, the rogue, mistakenly believing him to be as good a man as her father. A businessman, she thought. And he had wanted to move to the USA and become an American citizen, so they did, first to California, when their first child, Luisa, was a girl of twelve. Strangely, though her husband had been the one who had insisted that they move from her father's farm in Mexico to the USA, Rosa and not he had become a citizen.

They lived comfortably for some years, though Hernan often took long business trips and left Rosa and their daughter lonely. Then one day when Luisa was nearly eighteen, and when Rosa was pregnant again, a surprise pregnancy that came when she was already thirty-four, they moved again, quite suddenly, to Oregon.

That should have alerted her to his true nature. Hernan had come rushing in one day and said, "Pack your clothes. We're leaving." And within the hour, they left their nice apartment and all their belongings except for four suitcases stuffed with clothes. She had been seven months along, expecting Linda then, and it was a difficult, long drive for her. They knocked around in Oregon for a month before settling in the little town of Gravity Falls, which Hernan liked because, he said, "It will be easy to spot strangers here."

Luisa, a girl with a mind of her own, married at twenty, to her father's displeasure. "He will never make any money!" Hernan had raged. Worse in his eyes, Luisa's husband was a thin, reedy, Protestant, Anglo high-school teacher. Within a year their first child, a daughter pale as her father and named Rosa Stephanie, was born and they moved to a town closer to Portland, where Luisa's husband had found a somewhat better teaching job. A couple of years after that, their second daughter was born, a dark beauty they called Serena.

Rosa saw them when she could, but she never had the real pleasure of being a grandmother and spoiling her grandchildren because they lived hours away and Hernan refused to visit them.

Time went on. Linda, a sickly child, grew to be seventeen, and then she married, a man some years older than herself, named (she thought) Jaime Lopez. Hernan approved of  _him_ , because Jaime was his apprentice in the business. Linda and Rosa never really knew what business that was. In fact, eventually Rosa learned that her husband had been, truth to say, a  _pícaro_ , a con artist who, together with Soos's father, had made his living by smuggling things—people among them, and many worse things than people—from Mexico into the United States.

When Linda's son Jesús was barely four years old, tragedy struck. Supposedly off on a "business trip," Rosa's husband ran into some bad men in Mexico City and, by report, they killed him. The very day that bad news came, Rosa's son-in-law Jaime had deserted his wife and son. That was when they learned that he, too, was a criminal.

Rosa remembered the terrible shock when policemen came to Gravity Falls bringing the report of how her husband's body had been found. Mostly, though, they came with a warrant, looking for Soos's father.

Until the police told them differently, both Rosa and her daughter Linda had believed Jaime to be Mexican. They discovered that, though he spoke flawless Spanish like a native of Tijuana, he was one hundred per cent gringo, and his true name was Jacob Finster. Rosa always believed that the anguish of that discovery and of Finster's desertion of her and toddler Soos had caused her daughter's early death.

Luisa and her husband, who would never make much money, bless them, had offered help, but they had little to give. They had three children now, with the birth of Reggie, a few months older than Soos. They gave little presents and helped when they could. They lived close enough to drive over and take Soos for a day or a weekend now and again. That was about all they could do.

In the next years, Rosa had taken a job cooking in a restaurant, and on weekends she cleaned houses to support her grandson and herself. It was a struggle, and in those days, she was always very tired. When her daughter died only months after her husband deserted her, Rosa was tired and sad. And when Soos's father, fearing arrest, would not come to the funeral, would never visit his son, not even on his birthday, she was tired, sad, and angry.

That was when she gave Soos her own last name, when he was not yet five. His father had not deserved a namesake. Somehow or other, struggling and working hard, Rosa had kept their little house and had raised Soos all on her own. It had been exhausting.

But that was in the past, and now her personal telenovela had become more joyful and life was good, because she had a good grandson and he had a good wife and two excellent children. Stretching out in her recliner, Abuelita turned on the fine big-screen television that Soos had bought for her.

Her eyesight was not so good these days, and the oversized screen made things clear. She rarely used the remote to look for programs, because the TV was always tuned to the satellite channel that brought in her telenovelas.

There was the one about the young priest who had three wild and rather dim-witted sisters and had to keep getting them out of all kinds of funny trouble. And the one about the office in Mexico City in which no one, not even the boss, knew what business they were in, so they spent their days in romantic intrigue and elaborate pranks. And, oh yes, the one about the young man and his new bride who had to move in with his grandmother when he lost his job and she was pregnant—that was Rosa's favorite dramatic program.

Abuelita yawned. Well, now, year by year approaching the great age of eighty, she had retired and her grandson was making a good living for the family. And he was more than good to her. She had never liked the cold Oregon winters, and now every December Soos sent her back home to Mexico, where her younger brother now ran the family farm and where she could visit her sisters and their children. It was a good life, being retired, and she felt younger than her years.

And the best thing about no longer having to work outside the house was that she could always take an afternoon nap. She would sleep a little right after her favorite comedy show,  _¡Son sus Hermanas, Padre Pedro!_

But then, to her annoyance, just as the show began, the  _mechones_ drifted in. They were, what was the word in English, wisps of light—glowing vapors, from ping-pong ball size up to the size of a béisbol. They floated in from nowhere and crowded around her and she couldn't see the television well.

"Go away!" Rosa snapped.

The floating wisps, a pale electric blue, hovered around her. Three of them this time. She could not even concentrate on Father Pedro and his discovery that his youngest sister Tina had auditioned to be a dancer, but the job turned out to be for a stripper, and she was tempted by the money but was not sure she had the confidence (she jiggled her breasts every time she said the word "confidence") to succeed.

"Ay!" Rosa said, losing the thread of the story and getting up in irritation. She opened the window and shooed the vapors out. This was getting to be a real annoyance.

"I will have to do something about these things!" she said in a determined voice. Short of breath, she settled back into the recliner. "I will watch my show and then take a nap and then I will think what to do."

That sounded like a plan. She settled in and clucked her tongue and laughed when for the fourth time, the girl on the television pouted, "I only wish I had—"  _jiggle, jiggle!—_ "more confidence!"


	2. Las Brumas Misteriosas

**Telenovela**

**By William Easley**

**(August 7, 2015)**

* * *

**2: Las Brumas Misteriosas**

That evening after dinner, Ford and Dipper commandeered the dining-room table. "I don't think there can be any natural explanation for these things," Ford said. "Oregon doesn't have the kind of fireflies that might possibly account for them if they went crazy and flew around in swarms with their lights on."

"I remember seeing some of those when Mom and Dad took us to Florida one time to see our grandmother—um, you mother, I mean. They were yellow and pretty bright, and they just blinked on and off, but they didn't fly around in clouds."

Wendy settled in next to Dipper and put her arm on his shoulder. "Whoo! Busy day! I miss not having extra help around."

"Yeah," Dipper said in a sad voice. Though she had turned out to be a spy for an evil sorcerer, Traci had seemed like a friendly girl about his age, and he had liked her.

"Oh, I forgot to tell you," Ford said. "Sheila has said she'll be glad to come in and work part-time. She has retail experience, plus she's ABD for a degree in physics."

"She's over-qualified!" Wendy said, laughing. "But, sure, I betcha Soos would be glad to have her. Hey, Mr. Mystery!"

Soos, who had been straightening up the museum, lumbered in. "'Sup, Wendy?"

"Doc Pines says that Stan's wife would like a job."

"Well, actually—" Ford began.

"Cool!" Soos said. "Uh—doin' what?"

"Helping with sales," Wendy said. "Running the other cash register."

"Maybe just until you can find someone else," Ford said apologetically. "You may not want to be nepotistic—"

"'S OK, dawg!" Soos said happily. "I'm, like, a registered Independent."

"Uh, Soos, 'nepotism' means hiring people who are related to you."

"Oh, does it? That's cool, 'cause Stan and I—" Soos glanced around and then whispered, "aren't really father and son. Pow! Sprang that on you. Anyways, I love hirin' people who are related to other people! I'll bet everybody I ever hire is related to somebody, so, I'm, like, totally cool with that nepo stuff."

Dipper reached up to hold Wendy's hand and sent her a mental message:  _—Probably better to drop this right now._

 _I know, right?_ Aloud, Wendy said, "Soos, why don't you talk it over with Stan and her? I'll bet you can come to an arrangement."

"I'll do that!" Soos said.

"Now," Ford murmured, "Getting back to these floating luminous mists—"

"Oh, man!" Wendy said. "Are those back?"

"—they don't have an equivalent in—wait, what? Wendy, do you know about those things?"

"Like little blue fuzzy lights drifting around in the air? Yeah, seen 'em in the woods at night a lot of times, most often about this time of year. They're like those seven-year locusts. You don't see 'em for four, five years, and then they show up again. Dad calls 'em 'fireballs,' but they're not hot at all."

"Oh, girl dude!" Soos said. "Brumas!"

"What?" Dipper asked.

"Brumas!" Soos repeated. "I think that's, like, a Spanish word or some junk? It means, uh, like, you know, more than one bruma. Dawgs, you know what? You should totally ask my Abuelita about that stuff. I remember a long time back, I was real little, we had 'em one August, and she told me about 'em and stuff. Ask her!"

"I certainly will!" Ford said. "Uh—I don't want to disturb her—"

"No sweat, dawg. I mean Doctor Pines, dawg. Tell you what, I'll go ask her, and you and her can talk, like, here, or you can use the parlor or whatever. Ask her to tell you about brumas and Mexico, but once she gets started, you better take notes. Ooh! Or, like, record her! She'll go on for like an hour!"

"Would you please?" Ford asked, and Soos got up and hurried out.

Wendy sent Dipper a telepathic message:  _Do you have to be here for this, Dipper?_

— _Well, it's an investigation, but probably not for an interview. Especially if Ford records it._

"I had no idea we might find an informant living right here!" Ford said. "What a stroke of luck!"

_'Cause, dude, my dad and the boys are off until midnight. Movie night at my place? We could do a little mental fooling around._

Dipper said, "Grunkle Ford—" and broke off, coughing, because his voice had gone soprano. "Sorry, uh, frog in my throat. Maybe it would be better if I left you to interview Abuelita. I can always listen to the recording, and, uh—"

"You know how she is," Wendy added encouragingly. "She still thinks of Dip as a little kid, and she might not wanna talk about spooky legends that might give him nightmares."

"Yeah," Dipper said.

"That's a good point," Ford said. "Mason, if you trust me to do the interview, it might be better that way for the investigation."

"Oh, I trust you!" Dipper said. "You have your voice recorder?"

Ford reached inside his coat and produced it. He used it frequently—most often to record reminders to himself, because he had the Mabel gene of being easily sidetracked, and the recorder was one way to make sure he could remember a subject and eventually get back to it. "I have it, and it has a nearly full charge. I can record anything up to five hours!"

Dipper got up. "OK, then I'll leave you to it."

"Hey, Dip," Wendy said casually, "long as you're free, wanna come over to my house for a little while, just see a movie and chill?"

"I'd like that," Dipper said, fighting to keep his voice in the baritone range in which it had finally settled a year earlier. "Later, Grunkle Ford."

"Yes, yes," Ford said, jotting down some notes. "That's fine."

* * *

Dr. Pines didn't exactly intimidate Rosa, but she had been raised to have great respect for professionals, and surely anyone who could be called "doctor" must be a great professional. More than that, Stanford Pines was the identical twin brother of the original Mr. Mystery, Stanley Pines, who was a bit of a rogue but a warm-hearted man who had become Soos's father figure as well as employer, and she had a soft spot for the Pines men. Still more, Dr. Pines's wife Lorena was a cheerful, caring woman who years before, back when Soos was in his first year of high school, had volunteered to tutor him when he had great difficulty understanding mathematics.

With all of that taken into consideration, she agreed to have a conversation with the good Dr. Pines about the annoying balls of blurry light.

He began by identifying her and pronouncing her name nearly correctly—so close that she did not bother to correct him—and he pleased her by further remarking that she was the grandmother of Mr. Jesús Alzamirano Ramirez, the manager of the Mystery Shack. Though it was true that no one, including her, ever used any name but Soos in referring to him, it was pleasant to her to hear her grandson receive the respect and dignity of being referred to by his full name.

Then Ford briefly said he was investigating a phenomenon of floating luminous mists and asked her to tell her what she knew about them.

"Ah," she said. "When I was little we had them on the farm in Mexico. They come at this time of the year. My father, he called them  _mechones_. That is a word, it means, like—" she moved her fingers to help explain—"like dusty bunny? Like bit of wool?"

"Tuft?" Ford guessed.

"No, is soft, not tough."

"No, sorry, tuft," Ford repeated, stressing the second  _T_. "Like, uh, a, a, cotton ball?"

"Ah, sí, I understand. Yes, like very fine, thin ball of cotton. Or dusty bunny. Like, when I vacuum, some time there is one, he rolls along the floor, and is so hard to get him because when vacuum comes near, poof! he flies in air, you know? Floats."

"I understand. A  _mechone_ is like a wisp of fur, floating in the air."

"Yes, is right. But wrong, too, because is not made of hair or cotton, you know? Is made of light. Now, my aunt—she was old maid, you know? My father's older sister. And people talked about her and said she is a little  _tonta._ You know? A little silly, a little, how you say it, off the bases?"

"Eccentric," Ford said.

"Yes! That is the word! Because she was twenty years older than my papa, the daughter of my  _abuelo's_  first  _esposa_ , first wife, you know, and she died in giving birth to my aunt, and so she, my aunt, I mean, was raised by  _her_  abuela, and she was a real old country woman and had all these, what you call it,  _supersticiones._ " She smiled and said, "I am sorry. I speak English more better than that, but thinking of the old people—" she shrugged in apology.

Ford chuckled. "That's quite all right. When Stan and I visited our home town in New Jersey and started speaking with our cousins there, I found myself lapsing into the vernacular."

She nodded, a polite smile frozen on her face. "Well, my aunt," she said in a deliberate, careful tone, "she called these things, these  _mechones_  something different, she called them _brumas_. That is like a mist, a steam, you know? But one that is more like a ghost or evil spirit."

"I have never heard of them," Ford admitted. "Can you remember what your aunt told you about these  _brumas_?"

"Oh, yes." She smiled. "I told my little Soos about them when he was small, when one summer we saw a lot of them. They are a great annoyance. And my aunt, she said they were much trouble. My aunt—Tía Consuelo was her name—she told me things that I never told Soos, because I did not wish to scare him."

* * *

Sitting there in the recliner as Dr. Pines sat next to her on the sofa, Rosa found her voice taking on a reminiscent, far-away tone. She could not quite explain how terrifying her Aunt Consuelo could be, a tall, sharp-faced woman who wore all black, whose eyes burned with a strange energy. People in the district treated her well—she was the sister of a respected man, and though her manners were brusque, she caused no one harm, never gossiped, and was quick to offer aid if someone were ill or in trouble.

And yet she never smiled and spoke little, outside of her family.

But in the family, Consuelo would take a child on her knee in the evenings and would speak for hours of ghosts and demons and angels and good spirits.

The  _brumas_  belonged to the former category, the bad one. "They float on the hot nights," the old lady had warned. "They cluster around the curious, the troubled. They say they come into rooms where a baby sleeps alone and suck its breath. The baby becomes weak and thin. If there are enough  _brumas_ , the baby may even die.

"Older children, too—a  _bruma_  will mislead you, little one! You see it and think it is friendly, and you want to play with it, and the next thing you know, it leads you into a swamp that swallows you up! Or it gets in your head, and you go to sleep, and in the morning, you wake up and find a hundred years have passed in one night, and all your family are dead and buried! Never follow a  _bruma_!"

"Are they ghosts, Aunt?" little Rosa had asked one hot evening.

"No one knows," Consuelo had muttered. "But they are evil, not good! They are especially a curse on our family. Most of the time, they cannot harm us. Even a baby who sleeps in a room blessed with a crucifix on the wall above the crib, they cannot bother such a one. But sometimes, in bad years, when there are enough of them—that is the time when in the dark night they cluster in glowing clouds. And when the sun come up again, you find cows and goats dead and dry, as though they had been in the hot desert sun for weeks! But you know they were alive and well at sunset. Or people lose their mind, go crazy, and may never recover. Or, God help us, little babies whose parents do not defend them with prayers and scripture, they will be found dead in their cradles!"

"How do we get rid of them?" Rosa asked.

"If you find that out," Consuelo had said, stroking her niece's hair, "you will be a great woman one day."

* * *

"Wonder how Grunkle Ford's making out?" Dipper asked.

Stretched out on the bearskin rug in the Corduroy living room, Wendy snuggled up to him and said, "We know how  _we're_  making out. That enough for you?"

He laughed and said, "Quit it. You'll get me started again."

Wendy sighed. "I always feel so good after we have one of our mental make-outs! So relaxed. Man, I can get addicted to this. 'Course, after we're married, we gotta do it for real. I'm starting to think it would be real nice to have kids with you."

"That  _would_  be nice, but it'll have to wait," Dipper said. "Nothing physical until we're both old enough."

Wendy sighed, almost humming with contentment. "Yeah. We swore our oath, blah, blah." After a few moments, she asked softly, "Would you like to be a dad, Dip?"

"Oh, yeah, eventually." He kissed her cheek. "I sure hope the first one is a red-headed girl just like you!"

"Well, gingers  _do_  run in my family!" Wendy said. "But me, I'd like a son to start with. Don't get me wrong, a sweet daughter would be great, too. Twins, even."

Dipper rubbed her arm as she leaned her cheek against his. "I wouldn't mind that, Wendy. Either way. You know what they say—as long as the baby is healthy and has twelve fingers and twelve toes—"

"Oh, man!" Wendy said, yelping with surprised laughter. "Seriously, though, it would be fine with me if a kid of ours took after Ford! As long as it didn't start lecturing the day it learned to talk!"

"I wouldn't bet on that," Dipper started to say. He broke off. "Hey!"

"One of those fireballs!"

They were lying on the bearskin rug in front of the fireplace (no fire there now, not in the hottest month) because they thought that was safer than Wendy's bed when they were feeling affectionate, as they had been that evening—and they lay in the dark, not minding that they had totally missed the movie. Dipper could see the phenomenon now—a wisp of faint, blurred blue light, floating about three feet away from them at eye level. He reached cautiously to the lamp, but paused with his thumb on the switch.

— _Wendy, what's it doing?_

_Just hanging there, Dip. These things never make a sound._

— _What happens if I touch it?_

_Don't think you can. It just floats away, no matter how fast you move._

— _Close one eye, save your night vision._ Dipper closed his own left eye and then clicked on the light. The blue glow vanished. He turned the light back off and opened his left eye. There it was again. Mentally he told Wendy,  _It didn't disappear. The lamplight jut overpowered it. I've got the strangest feeling it's watching us._

_Yeah, I think you're right, Dip. Well, one good thing, anyhow._

— _What's that?_

_At least we kept our clothes on!_


	3. ¿Qué son?

**Telenovela**

**By William Easley**

**(August 8, 2015)**

* * *

**3: ¿Qué son?**

**From the Journals of Dipper Pines:** _This morning Grunkle Ford let me listen to the recording of his interview with Abuelita. He's assigned me to research the folklore about apparitions like the brumas. "There's not much to go on," he told me. "It's evidently a local description. See what you can find."_

_Otherwise, he's not sure that the appearance of these floating lights is a threat. "They don't register above a ten on the anomaly detector," he told me. The scale goes up to a hundred, so that's not very much. I mean, a vengeful ghost only ranks about 75. These barely qualify as unusual. Anyway, I mean for Gravity Falls!_

_More, he pointed out that the lights can penetrate the barrier around the Shack. "If they were trans-dimensional or malevolent," he reasoned, "they would not get through. I wish I knew whether they were appearing elsewhere."_

" _Wendy and I saw one at her house last night!" I blurted. "And you protected the Corduroy house when we were getting prepared for Brujo's attack."_

" _Interesting," Ford said. "Did the one you saw seem to behave in a threatening way?"_

" _Not really. It was kind of dim. In fact, we couldn't even see it with the lights on—" I broke off, realizing how that must sound._

" _You were in the dark with Wendy?" Ford asked._

" _Yeah!" Mabel chirped, coming in for breakfast. "'Cause kisses are sweeter when you can't see 'em comin'! Boop!"_

" _Stop poking my nose!" I complained._

" _I want pancakes!" Mabel said._

" _So go cook them!" I told her._

" _I want to be pampered with pancakes!"_

_Wendy came downstairs. She and I had run that morning, and she'd just finished her shower. "Pancakes sound good," she said. "Come on, Mabes. We'll cook some."_

" _Hey, Wendy!" Mabel said. "Why were you and Dipper all alone in the dark last night, huh? He won't tell us!"_

_With a smile, Wendy said, "Eh, it was movie night!"_

" _Oh, just a movie and chillin', huh?" Mabel asked._

" _That sounds relaxing," Ford said._

_Mabel chortled, but before she could say more, Wendy dragged her out. I cleared my throat. "Yeah, well, Wendy and I were on the bear—love—sofa, I mean—in front of the TV in the living room, you know, and it was movie night and all, and we noticed this blue floating light, but when I turned on the lamp, it was too dim to see. The room had to be pretty dark."_

" _Did it make any threatening moves?" Ford asked._

_I shook my head. "Wendy and I kind of got the feeling it was just spying on us. Like it was interested in us and was just checking us out. Not that we were doing anything. I mean, we were sitting and holding hands. And fully clothed. Well, our shoes were off."_

" _Perhaps," Ford said slowly, "these are some kind of observers. Or a television-like device? Maybe not anything sentient at all, but something like a remote camera?"_

_Happy that his train of thought had come to a switch and taken a different rail, I said, "I'll get right on the research after we close tonight."_

_I heard a car outside, and a moment later, Grunkle Stan and Aunt Sheila came in. Stan, as usual, was grinning. "Hiya, knuckleheads!" he said. "Ford, Lorena wanted to know if you're ever comin' home again."_

" _Ever coming—my word, I slept in the lab last night!" Ford said. "I knew I'd forgotten something!" He stood up. "Has she had breakfast?"_

" _Not yet," Sheila said. "We haven't either. Stan wanted to eat here."_

" _I'll rush home and take her out to eat," Ford said. "I'm lucky she's so forgiving!" He hurried out._

" _I'll go rustle up some Stancakes," Stan said, heading for the kitchen._

_Wendy must have heard him, because she called back, "No sweat, Stan! Mabes and me have enough batter made up for everybody. You guys want eggs? Sausage?"_

" _Yes and yes," Stan said. "Thanks, Wendy! You doin' OK, Pumpkin?"_

" _I'm making pancakes with smiley faces!" Mabel announced. "And then I'll make you and Aunt Sheila some Mabelets! They're like omelets, but more fun! Where's the glitter?"_

_So began a typical Saturday in the Mystery Shack._

* * *

Sheila took the extra cash register that the late Traci had operated. "Miss her?" she asked Dipper quietly.

He was at Wendy's old register. "Yeah, I do," he admitted. "And it makes me mad. I mean, I liked her! Not like I like Wendy, but Traci seemed to be a cool girl, you know? And it turned out she'd been lying to us and was a spy for Brujo all along. That was hard to deal with. I—well, I have—I guess you'd say trust issues."

"You said it," Stan said, strolling in. He had dressed as Mr. Mystery. "I'm givin' Soos a day off today, by the way. Trust issues? Hah! When he was twelve, an' I'd fixed up Ford's cockamamie Portal to bring him back from God knows where, Dip wanted to shut the thing down and ruin everything. He didn't  _trust_ me, for no reason at all! Lucky Mabel did!"

"There were reasons," Dipper muttered.

"What, like I hid the lab from you guys? Or I lied about nearly everything? Or I had Journal 1 all along and made a copy of Journal 3 and then got Journal 2 from Gideon and you didn't know? Or that the Feds arrested me? You call those reasons? What's them against my askin' you to trust me?"

Dipper gave up and grinned. "Yeah, I guess I was pretty dumb."

"Meh, you were twelve." Stan went over and put his arm around Sheila's waist. "How do I look, darlin'?"

"Mysterious," she said, kissing him.

Mabel wandered in. "Get a room, you guys!"

"Love is in the air," Dipper said.

"I'll check that out when Teek comes in to work," Mabel promised. "Gonna go exercise the pigs!"

"Come back when the tourists show up," Stan said as she headed outside. "Gonna be a crowd today. And remember, next weekend's Woodstick!"

"You got it to come back?" Dipper asked.

"Yeah. Works like a charm. The chumps come in, they get free parkin' at the Shack, and they all drop in to see what we got. We move a lotta merch over a Woodstick festival!"

Dipper grinned. Since Stan and Ford, who held the deed to the Shack, didn't take a profit from it, all the proceeds would go to Soos—who supported his family but also plowed about half of all the profits into improving and expanding the Shack. Still, Stan had spent thirty years as a huckster showman, and he still loved to put on the act and measure his success by how much junk he persuaded visitors to buy.

Most of his income these days came from prudent investments, like tickets to Las Vegas or Atlantic City, where—so far—he had expertly walked the line so that the casinos didn't actually ban him. He knew just how much he could win without tripping their alarms. Then, too, he was holding certain assets (he still refused to talk about them) that he had recovered when he and Ford had taken an exploratory trip by boat up to the Arctic. Technically, he had expected to wait another four years before liquidating whatever it was, but a certain clandestine Agency had recently persuaded a Federal court to rule that the Statute of Limitations did not, in this case, apply, and he was free to sell whatever it was for a profit.

At nine o'clock, Wendy, looking sharp in her Assistant Manager outfit—tan slacks, white top, green jacket—said, "Look alive, people! We got tourists!" Mabel came in to help charm the kiddies, Grunkle Stan took a group out on the Mystery Trail tour, and Sheila and Dipper got busy selling souvenirs.

It looked like a busy day.

* * *

"What do you think they are, Abuelita?" Soos asked. He was taking advantage of his day off to play with Little Soos.

"They always told me the brumas were wicked," she said. "Like a ghost or a little devil."

"Yeah," Soos said, "but I remember seein' 'em when, like, you know, I was like ten and twelve years old. They never hurt me. I tried to catch one in a pickle jar once, remember?"

"Yes, a great big gallon glass jar I took for you from the  _restaurante,_ " she said with a reminiscent smile. "I tell you then, though, is not possible! Is like finding the end of the rainbow. When you get there, it is always somewhere else."

"I nearly got one," Soos said. "I think I might have got one if I hadn't, like, put on the jar like a space helmet. That was fun until, you know, I passed out from lack of oxygen or whatever."

"I remember, you scare me so much!"

"How'd you get that off my head, anyhow?" Soos asked.

"Oh, you were on your back in the grass beside the porch. I hop off the porch onto your stomach with my feet. The jar pop off like a cork from a bottle. Pop!"

"Yes!" Soos said. "And now I'm a poppa!"

"Poppa!" Little Soos shouted joyfully, and Soos picked him up and tossed him high in the air, making him squeal with laughter.

"I dunno, Abuelita," Soos said as he swung his son around in a circle. "Maybe those things aren't, like, you know, ghosts and junk. Maybe they're like some kind of special Gravity Falls firefly or some deal."

"No," Abuelita said, shaking her head. "We had them in Mexico, too. People told bad stories about them. Maybe they do not harm people, but I don't like them anyway. They have no business coming into the house! Let them stay outside."

"You have a point," Soos said.

* * *

Not long after that, Teek O'Grady parked in the employees' area and came in to open up the snack bar. Mabel hugged him and gave him a kiss and then the two of them went in to fire up the deep-fryer and the grills. A few minutes later, Mabel opened the snack-bar cash register, and then just at eleven they got their first food order, and everyone was hard at work.

The day had started out overcast and unusually humid—at dawn, running to town and back, Wendy and Dipper had huffed and puffed—but a westerly breeze had sprung up, the clouds had been pushed away, and by eleven the day had turned clear, cooler, and bright.

So bright, in fact, that the small glowing fields of energy were too dim for anyone to see them. Animals—a different story. Squirrels fled into the trees from them. Dogs sensed them and barked. Cats stalked them. The animals had senses that humans either lacked or ignored.

However, the brumas did drift about, even inside the Shack, following Wendy as she conducted the Museum tours, hovering nearby as Teek efficiently grilled dogs and burgers and cooked French fries, trailing Melody and Soos as they took the kids out for some air and play on the lawn. One of them seemed to be attracted to Stan and to follow closely as he drove the tram and talked about the wonders of the Mystery Trail (the Bottomless Pit! The Outhouse of Mystery, rumored to occasionally host a green ogre kind of creature and to have an uncanny effect on the normal flow of time, the Glen of the Gnomes, the Talking Rock, and many other mostly bogus sights).

In the sunlight, the brumas were all but invisible. Now and again a tourist might squint, wondering what had caused the reflection off to the left. In the deepest shadows along the trail, sometimes you might glimpse the glow and write it off as sunlight filtering through the tree canopy. Nothing to be alarmed about.

It was an odd fact, though, that on Saturday there were more than a dozen brumas floating around the property, whereas on the previous Saturday there had been only three.

Their numbers were increasing.

And still—no one had the least idea of what they were.

Or what they wanted.


	4. Los Voladores

**Telenovela**

**By William Easley**

**(August 8, 2015)**

* * *

**4: Los Voladores**

In his role as Mr. Mystery, Soos had to improvise when the tram went past a deeply-shaded grove of trees and someone asked, "What are those floating lights?"

"Oh, dude!" Soos exclaimed. "Those are one of the mystical, like, wonders of Gravity Falls!" He slowed the tram and glanced over. About half a dozen of the floating lights, dim though in the shadows, had lined up and apparently were tracking along with the tram. "Those, are like, uh, the famous Nosy Lights? They, like, want to see what's goin' on, dawgs! So sometimes they come out and just sort of watch us, you know."

"Are they alive?" someone asked.

"Oh, man! Nobody knows. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe somewhere in between!"

An anxious little girl asked, "Will they hurt us?"

"Aw, no!" Soos said. "They're, like, completely harmless. No teeth. And, uh, here's something else—people who see them say they have good luck for, like, a week afterward! How awesome is that?" He revved up the electric motor. "OK, glowing dawgs, nice to see you! Catch you later! Now, if you look over to the right, you'll see, like a fairy ring. There, in the grass—that bright green circle? That's where the fairies, like, break-dance and stuff, dudes!"

And so the tour went. That was at noon, when the sun was nearly straight overhead. In the afternoon the lowering sun shone into the forest more, and the lights were gone, or at least no longer visible.

And late in the afternoon, after the final Mystery Tour of the day, Soos tapped on Abuelita's door. "Come in," she said.

Soos went in. His grandmother was stretched out in her recliner, and on the TV,  _¡Compañeros Nietos!_  was just ending. Roughly translated, that title means "Our Roommates Are Our Grandchildren!" Rosa used the remote to turn off the television and asked, "What do you need,  _mi hijo?"_

Soos rubbed his elbow. "Is it OK if I, like, sit down and junk?"

"Of course," Rosa said. "Would you like this chair?" she made as if to get up.

"No, that's OK." Soos took the other chair, the one Rosa sat in when writing letters at her little desk. "Abuelita, those stories you told me about brumas—"

Her face darkened with anger. "Are those things bothering you? They are such nuisances!"

"Uh, not bothering me so much, Abuelita, but they hang around so much this summer, you know? Are they really, like, little flying demons or some junk?"

"Ay!" Abuelita lowered the leg rest on her recliner and sat up, frowning. "No one knows! I think, though, they may be my fault."

"Huh?" Soos asked. "How could they be your fault?"

"Well . . . I have spoken to many, many peoples here in Gravity Falls, and even the oldest of them say the lights were never seen in the old days. We moved here back in the 1980s, and until then, no one remembers seeing the lights. Then for many, many years no one saw much of them. But now they seem to swarm, like the bees!" Speaking more softly, her voice confidential, Rosa added, "I fear they may have followed us here from Mexico!"

"Because you remember them from when you were, like, a little girl?"

"Sí. And stories I heard my old aunt tell me. I think maybe they lived in Nayarit—that is the Mexican state where I was born—and maybe they were interested in our family more than others. I know my abuela saw them, and my old aunt. But not in such numbers as here! So maybe some followed me and like rabbits, they bred."

"But why?" Soos asked.

"Ah, that I do not know. Maybe to bring me bad luck!"

"Or maybe good luck?" Soos asked hopefully.

She smiled. "Possibly good luck, _mi hijo_. Who knows? I have had both in my life." She thought for a few moments. "Next winter, when I go to visit my family, why don't you and Melody and your children come with me? You have never been."

"That sounds nice," Soos said.

"Yes, I would like you to meet your aunts and great-uncle down there. To see the big farm where I was a little girl. I would like them to see what a fine man you have become."

"But we couldn't stay, like, the whole time," Soos said. "Because, you know, there's junk I still have to do around the Shack. How about we fly down with you after we close up the Shack for the winter and Melody and the kids and me will stay for, like, two weeks? That would be a good vacation, and we could do all the family stuff with you."

"I would like that very much," Rosa said. "It would be nice to see you with the family before I go to live with the angels."

"You're not going soon, are you?" Soos asked.

Rosa laughed. "God plans that, not I! But I hope not. I feel well, and the children keep me young! But just now, while I am still feeling that way, it would be so nice. I wonder—maybe your aunt Luisa and her husband would like to go, too. I will ask her."

"And there's Reggie and his wife, and my cousins—oh, man, this could get way expensive."

"No, no, I would not ask you to pay all! If they have the money and would like to take the vacation, though, it might be a pleasant, how is the word, family reunion. A joyful time. I will ask Luisa. I will ask."

A blur of light caught Soos's attention. "There's one of those things now!" he said, jumping out of his chair. The faint blue light, no bigger than a golf ball, hovered a foot in front of his face. He took off his fez and tried to scoop it up, but the light easily evaded him and zipped out into the hall. "I wonder why they're always hangin' around?" he said, carefully putting the fez back atop his head. "Dr. Pines and Dipper are, like, trying to figure it out, but maybe some things aren't meant for dudes to know."

* * *

"So," Wendy was saying, "my aunt Sallie says those light-thingies don't go way, way back in history. She remembers them from when she was younger, though. Not so many of them back then."

They had just closed up the Shack for the day, and Wendy had changed back to her regular clothes—green plaid flannel shirt, jeans, boots, and of course her trapper's hat—and they were up in the attic bedroom. Dipper sat at the table he used as a desk, his laptop on but idle.

"There are stories about floating lights in old papers," he said. "But they sound like something different, more like a will-o'-the-wisp—you know what those are?"

"You've got no secrets from me," Wendy said gravely. Then she grinned. "It's, like, European folklore, right? Dim lights that used to lead travelers off the path at night?"

"Yeah," Dipper said. "Mostly just mischievous, but in places like, oh, Dartmoor in England—that's where there are these swampy marshes, you know? It's where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle set the Sherlock Holmes story  _The Hound of the Baskervilles—_ "

"I remember seeing a movie," Wendy said.

"Well, anyway, there they said that if a traveler at night wasn't wary, they might see a will-o'-the-wisp and think it was somebody with a dim lantern and if they went toward it, they could get caught in quicksand and be sucked down to drown."

"You mean these things we got hangin' around could turn murderous?"

"Well—I don't think these are the same kind of things," Dipper told her. "They're real small, and will-o'-the-wisps tend to be bigger, I think—more like glowing figures, ghosts, or at least that's how lots of old stories describe them. There's natural explanations for them, too—marsh gas, maybe, methane spontaneously combusting. Or maybe cobwebs that have a luminous fungus on them, or piezoelectric clouds—"

"Dude, you lost me," Wendy said.

"Oh, well, piezoelectricity results when some solids, like quartz, are put under pressure. They produce sparks of electricity, together with light. Some geologists think that seismic strain might force clouds of water vapor from rocks, and they rise up to the surface, and if they contain traces of stuff like quartz, there might be a lingering effect."

Wendy shook her head. "Man, when you hang around Ford—"

Dipper laughed. "OK, try this. Get some wintergreen-flavored Life Savers—"

"I prefer," Wendy said with a grin, "peppermint!"

"Well—that causes a different kind of spark," Dipper said. "But listen: Some wintergreen-flavored life sabers, OK? Then go into the bathroom and shut off all the lights. Wait for about five minutes for your eyes to adjust to the dark—"

"Not in my house," Wendy said. "Three guys, and only one john. I'm lucky to get TWO minutes alone in there!"

"You can try it here," Dipper said. "Use, I don't know, a paper towel or something and make sure your mouth is dry. Then pop in one of the candies and look in the mirror as you bite into it with your mouth open. Sparks will fly out of your mouth."

"No way!"

"Yes, way!"

"You mean like a crime scene in my mouth?"

"It works. It's called 'triboluminescence,' and it's caused when the wintergreen oil fluoresces. They think the piezoelectric effect starts it, though."

"Hey, I think we got some rolls of wintergreen Life Savers down at the check-out counter. Let me go check."

Wendy went down and came back a couple of minutes later in triumph. "Got 'em! I'm gonna check it out! Wanna come and help?"

"Um—you, me, in a small room, all the lights out? What could go wrong?"

"C'mon. I dare you!"

"Won't be the same without peppermint, but let's go try for some sparks."

Dipper was fussy about excluding all the light. He closed and locked the bathroom door and they turned out the light. "Got some leakage," he said. He opened the hamper and stuffed a towel along the crack at the bottom of the door and hung another one over the doorknob to shut off the small light leak from the keyhole. Even then it wasn't absolutely pitch dark, but he decided it was probably close enough.

They waited, and then Wendy polished her teeth with a paper towel. "OK, dude," she said. "If this doesn't work, you owe me five bucks, OK? 'Cause like I said, wintergreen isn't my favorite."

"That's fair, that's fair," Dipper said. "But if it does work, if you produce sparks, then you owe me."

"Five bucks?"

"I'll settle for a kiss."

"I can deal with that. Here goes. Let me see—yep, here's the mirror. OK, Dip, I'm poppin' one of the candies!" A second later, she crunched it and said, "No freakin' way! Little thunderstorm in my mouth! I'm gonna do that again!"

Dipper could see the sparks both in the mirror and also directly in Wendy's mouth. That was nice. It let him home in on the target.

* * *

Ford and Lorena had been stalking the interior and the grounds of the Shack, so far without success. Though they made the rooms as dark as they could, no little glowing puffs of vapor showed up. "You've lived here all your life," Ford said. "You must have heard of these things."

"Oh, sure," she told him. "Back when I was about, I don't know, somewhere between about six and twelve years old, they showed up one year. The kids called them 'fairy lights.' They told the usual kind of stories about them—if you caught one, you could get a wish. The problem was, nobody could catch one!"

"Could you narrow down the time a little more?"

They had gone out onto the porch of the Shack and were sitting side by side on the sofa. The evening had darkened to night—not a deep, dark night yet, but one of those soft, dusky moments when you could easily see someone near you, but not in detail. Lorena, snuggled next to Ford, thought hard. "I'm not really sure. I was just a little girl, I know that. For one thing, they said that if a girl caught one of the things, she could ask it who she'd marry. I wasn't interested in that back then. I wanted to wish for a pony!"

"All right, let's come back to that later. Did you ever see one?"

"Everyone did, I think. I was no exception. I think—yes, I'm pretty sure it was Summerween. My friends and I were out trick-or-treating, and Gwendolyn Rutherford—she's Gwen Manning now, you know—anyway, she spotted one drifting along. That was the only time when I was little. But then a lot later—I think when I was about twenty or so—one summer we had all these strange bursts of light, nearly like the aurora, over a week or two, always late at night. And that summer I used to see them now and again, just floating along, usually about twenty feet up. It was just one of the odd things about living here. I remember one Fourth of July—it was a Monday night, I remember—when I saw a whole cloud of them—huh. That's strange."

"What is?"

"Well, my family used to live up on Cold Creek Road, and I was driving in that evening alone to meet a boy and then go with him to the lake to see the fireworks. I just remembered I saw that swarm of lights go zipping right across in front of the car, maybe five or six feet off the ground. I braked so I wouldn't hit them. And I was just down the hill, not half a mile from here, where Cold Creek Road intersects with the highway."

Ford took a deep breath. "That must have been in 1981," he said.

"Yes, that sounds about right. But how did you know?"

"Because," Ford said reluctantly, "I first tested the Portal on the evening of July 4, 1981. That was the night that my assistant got pulled inside the Portal, and that experience started his mental breakdown."

"Oh, darling! I'm sorry I mentioned it."

"You didn't know. And I saved Fiddleford from being pulled all the way through, and eventually he recovered. It's all right."

For a few moments they sat there silently, cuddling. And then Lorena said, almost shyly, "Well, anyway, even if the lights are scarce, it's a nice night to be out here. Romantic."

"Yes, I would agree," Ford said. "The temperature is optimal, the sky is clear, the night sounds are pleasant—"

"Then shut up and kiss me," Lorena whispered.

Ford obliged.

And because when one kisses, even if one is middle-aged, one closes one's eyes, neither Ford nor Lorena noticed that a pale blue glowing orb had zipped up close and hovered about two feet away, as if it were just staring at them.


	5. ¡Soos no es Soos!

**Telenovela**

**By William Easley**

**(August 8, 2015)**

* * *

 

**5: ¡Soos no es Soos!**

**From the Journals of Dipper Pines:** _Saturday, 11:40 PM. Wendy and I are really bothered by these floating lights. Tomorrow Ford and I are going to try to come up with a way of capturing them—if they're even material. If they're insubstantial, like ghosts, it might be more a matter of repelling them._

_I mean, to get away from them, Wendy and I walked out to the bonfire glade. Mabel's started calling it our Make-Out Mansion, but really, it's a place where Wendy and I can talk and relax. Wendy's still driven about half crazy by her brothers and her dad now and then, although last fall she got real mad this one time and threatened to leave if they didn't shape up, and since then, she says, they've been doing a little bit better._

_Tonight, we talked mostly about Traci and how we miss her. From Ford's friends—his official friends, and I'll leave it at that, since I don't want anybody to confiscate my Journals—Grunkle Ford has learned that she had kind of a bad past._

_Well, let's be honest: a real bad past. Bad family situation, she got expelled from school, there was substance abuse and so on and so forth—but down deep she struck both Wendy and me as a really nice person. Ford's learned that after an autopsy her body was cremated. He asked for the ashes. They're supposed to be delivered next week but he doesn't know what to do with them. She doesn't seem to have any family that can be traced, so . . .._

" _Dude," Wendy said, "I think she was happy here, you know? I mean, I never caught one evil vibe from her. I think she was under the spell of Brujo, and that the worst she did was to spy on us and report back to him. I think, push came to shove, if she'd had the chance, she might even have lined up on our side against him. Least, I'd like to hope so."_

" _Yeah," I said. "Me, too." I guess I saw more of her than Mabel did, because Traci and I worked together for at least those few days. Anyway, I think this time around, I feel worse than Mabel does for the loss. Since all that ended, every night I think of Traci and sometimes I just feel so sad._

_OK, I cry sometimes, all right? Because losing her was such a waste. So anyhow, I thought I understood what Wendy was saying. "Maybe we should scatter her ashes here?" I asked. "On the grounds of the Shack?"_

" _Yeah, that's my thinking," Wendy agreed. "And how about this? We might put up a little plaque somewhere. Just so her name wouldn't be forgotten, you know?"_

_After I'd thought it over, I said, "How about this: You know that little hollow, the small crater place with all the trees growing around it in a circle?"_

_Wendy chuckled. "The redwood circle. I ought to! Soos decided to call that place the Pixie Grove, and I just about puke every time I announce that when I'm drivin' the tram."_

" _Here's my idea_.  _Let's get a bunch of wildflower seeds and make a wildflower garden down in the hollow. I mean, it'd look real nice in the summers. And we could call that the Traci Niederlander Memorial Garden. We could, I don't know, come up with a story that the pixies loved her and when she passed away, they made this little wildflower garden in her memory. We could put up a plaque there."_

" _That wasn't her real name, you know."_

_I said, "I know it wasn't. But if the Shack has taught me anything, it's that things don't have to be real to be true."_

_Wendy hugged me. "That's about the sweetest—" she started to say. But then she broke down and cried, and so did I. We sat there in the dark, hugging each other tight and crying on each other's shoulders. And then, through our telepathy, Wendy said to me,_ Oh, damn, Dip, they're back.

_We had four of the lights hanging around us. I jumped up, took off my cap, and swatted at them. "Go away!"_

_They flitted away a few feet but sort of circled us. "Come on," I said to Wendy._

_Instead of going back to the Shack, though, we walked into the forest, to the clearing where the stone effigy of Bill Cipher stands. "I'm going to try to get in touch with him," I told Wendy. "If anybody would know what these things are, I think it's him."_

" _I don't know, dude," Wendy said. "I don't think I'd be happy with you calling me 'Red' tonight, for some reason."_

" _I'll try to keep from doing that," I promised. "Come and shake me awake if it looks like I'm in trouble."_

_She backed off, and I sat on the fallen beam—squishy, because it's sprouting mushrooms—and went into the sort of Zen dream state and from there I slipped—_

* * *

Into the Mindscape. Where, even if in the real world it's nearly eleven at night and very dark, in the true world, it's the same foggy-morning gray version of surreality that it always is.

Time seems to stand still in the Mindscape. Things happen, but minutes stop ticking off the clock.

With his Mindscape self sitting on the Mindscape beam, Dipper reached out. "Bill? Are you there, man?"

He heard what sounded like, but was not, an annoying recording: "Thank you for trying to reach Bill Cipher. All our lines are busy, but if you'll stay on the line, nothing will happen for maybe three weeks or more. Meanwhile, have a great day."

An earworm of a jaunty little hold tune crawled into Dipper's ears. "Stop it!" he said irritably. "Bill? I know you're in here somewhere. Come on, man!"

"That's nearly one hundred per cent wrong," came Bill's distant voice. "But nearly one-one hundredth of a percentage point right. What's up, Pine Tree? How are we doing?"

"Where are you?"

"Mostly somewhere else, and real busy. But part of me will always be right here."

"Where?"

Bill remained invisible. "Where do you think? Right inside your head!" His voice changed: "EEEEE TEEEEE PHONE HOME!" Pause. "Nothing? Hey, that's a ref to a real classy movie! Come on, Pine Tree, give me something to work with! That's the trouble—you and Red just watch these dogs of movies. Catch me doing a reference to  _Night of the Bloodthirsty Tree Toads!_ Not likely, buddy!"

"Bill, whatever, man, I wanted to ask you about—"

"Little glowing floating balls of light, yeah, yeah, I know. Sorry, Pine Tree, I got nothin' here. See, I'm only a little tiny Bill Cipher splinter down deep inside you. Most of me is off being busy. Normally I could still communicate with Big Bill and dish out what that part of me knows, but right now, nope. Because he's all tied up."

"Wait, you mean the part of you that I used to visit here—"

"Has gone bye-bye," Bill said. "No, not like you're thinking, not to my own dimension. Still hanging out here in yours, kid, but I'm learning what it's like to be ordinary. And going through some changes, you know, getting things together, getting ready to start a new leaf, turn over a new life. It's gonna be a while before that part of me, which is frankly the part with most of the know-how, can communicate with you. The little molecular part of me inside you, meh, I'm basically just a cheerleader and ear to bend if you got something worth saying."

"How can we find out what the lights are?" Dipper asked.

"You might try asking them."

"Will they answer?"

"Nope, but it's a way of passing the time."

"What good will that do?" Dipper asked, irritated.

"Hey, hey, c'mon, kid! Everybody has to pass the time. Time you learned that!"

"I give up. So long, Bill."

"Nuh-uh! Always gonna be here, Pine Tree. We're stuck with each other. All the time."

Dipper had the feeling that Bill was waiting for something. "What?"

"You used to be fun, Pine Tree! Oh, come on! I gave you four clues! Mind you, I don't for positive KNOW what's going on with the tiny shinies, but I got my suspicions! Trouble is, because of the Axolotl's strict rules about my last chants, I can't simply come out and tell you. Bad things would happen if I did."

"What?"

Bill's voice, or Dipper's perception of it, grew frenzied: f"Fire and brimstone raining from the sky! The oceans boiling! Forty years of an endless loop of 'Bohemian Rhapsody!' Earthquakes and volcanoes, the dead rising from the gravy, inhuman sacrifice, dogs and cats living in sin! Hiss Massteria!"

" _Ghostbusters_ ," Dipper said in a tired voice.

Now Bill sounded pleased: "Hey! You do know one movie that didn't suck. Kid, you can solve this. Just don't dwell on it continuumly."

"Seriously? That's your advice?"

"Serially. Think it over. Take your time. And, hey, just a little tip here—next time you lip-lock with Red, try a little friendly wrestling. She digs that."

"Digs? That's kind of old school for you!"

Bill gave his loony laugh: "Ah, ha-ha-ha-ha! I'm too _young_ for new school! Gotta go, kid! Time's passing!"

Suddenly, with almost an audible  _blip!_ Dipper woke up and found himself sagging forward and on the verge of toppling. "Whoa!" He got his balance and Wendy came up behind him and steadied him as he stood up. "Thanks."

"So, what did Bill say?"

"Nothing that made sense," Dipper told her. "The lights still here?"

"Yeah, dude, they're just, I dunno—orbiting. Four of them. There goes one, see it?"

Yes. The four blue lights circled at the periphery of the clearing. "They creep me out," Wendy complained.

"Do you get the feeling they're, you know, watching us?"

"Kinda," she admitted. "Ready to go back?"

They walked back toward the Shack, their arms around each other's waist. Dipper thought, — _This used to seem so silly to me, when I was twelve and saw teens doing it._

That amused Wendy. _Yeah, well, it gets different when you ARE a teen, man!_ She playfully hip-bumped him.

— _And when you're a guy with his arm around a beautiful redhead._

_Get out of town, man!_

— _It's a nice night._

_Beautiful night._

Dipper stopped, and she stopped, and they kissed. "Nice," she murmured. "You brought some peppermint.

"I've got a whole roll of them in my pocket," he said.

She pressed closer to him. "Yum. I love me some peppermint!"

"Tell you what—if you can pin me down, you can have them all."

Wendy laughed. "You got like no chance, Dip! But for the sake of argument, if  _you_  pinned  _me_  down, what would happen then?"

"Mm," Dipper said, pretending to think it over. "OK, how's this? If I pin you down—you get 'em all."

"Ver-r-ry tempting," Wendy said. "But those things are watchin' us. Maybe."

"We could at least give them something to see," Dipper said, grinning in the dark.

* * *

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines (continued):** _So I told her we could give them something to see—and, well, you know I'd never thought it would be fun to wrestle a girl before, but I guess you don't know until you try._

_Oh—she got the whole roll of peppermint Life Savers._

* * *

**Preliminary Report from Surveillance Team:** _For reasons we do not understand, Jesús Alzamirano Ramirez no longer appears to be himself. While his somatic pattern remains exactly the same, with a 100% DNA match to our records, his brain patterns exhibit significant variances dating back two weeks from the time of this report. His pattern of thinking is significantly altered._

_The change was sudden and inexplicable. Our observer units have so far been unable to register any behavioral differences, and his interpersonal skills and relationships continue unchanged. His attitudes and general sense of himself, along with such attributes as humor, appetite, and a tendency to taste anything new he encounters remain the same as always. Exactly what the change is has so far eluded us._

_We are expanding our coverage to monitor his interactions with associates and family in an effort to understand the changes we are recording in his thought patterns._

_While we understand the inadvisability of a direct intervention, a team should prepare for that eventuality. Since the individual under survey has been identified as the most important figure in the decisive actions during the year 2035, we must be assured that he is still the same person and that the variances in thought patterns will make no difference in his behavior and reaction to the threat._

_The hypotheses raised so far have not checked out. These include hypnotic control; alien parasitic infestation; the accidental exchange of the subject from Dimension 46'\ with a near-twin; brain damage; drain bramage; time slip; slime tip; and instrument failure on our part._

_On a side note, the relationship between Wendy Blerble Corduroy and Mason Alexander "Dipper" Pines appears to be adequate-plus and on the correct time schedule for its eventual development into a favorable resolution for our purposes._

_(Observer remark: They ARE a cute couple.)_

_(Manager remark: Keep that stuff out of official reports!)_

_(Unit Supervisor remark: I LIKE reading it!)_

_(Manager remark: Oh, never mind, then!)_

_**Recommendation: Intensify observation.** _


	6. Sesiones estratégicas

**Telenovela**

**By William Easley**

**(August 9, 2015)**

* * *

**6: Sesiones estratégicas**

"They're so annoying!" Dipper said to his Grunkle Ford. They had met in the lab beneath the Shack—the workday had ended, Wendy had gone home, and Mabel and Teek were off on one of their dates. That Sunday afternoon seemed a good time for a strategy session. As usual, they sat in the area that Ford called his office—a room with a high table, computers, and for Ford a desk chair cranked up to suit his height, for Dipper a stool that wasn't all that comfortable. Dipper grunted in frustration. "I mean, they show up at times when—I wish they wouldn't!"

"Agreed," Ford said. "They have a distracting tendency to appear just when it would be gratifying to concentrate on . . . other things."

Dipper nodded. "And they're getting worse! This morning when Wendy and I did our run through town, we kept glimpsing them, pacing us! Three on one side, three on the other, about ten feet away! Of course, we could see them only while we were on the side of the road, under the trees. And then we could only see them in our peripheral vision. If we looked straight at them—"

"They disappear, yes, I know," Stanford said. "That's because of the structure of the human retina. As you may know, there are two types of photoreceptors in the eyes, rods and cones. When the light falls on the rods, which are dominant on the periphery of the retina, you have greater sensitivity to light, though with less acuity of vision. If you look directly toward the subject in dim light, the image focuses on the cones, which have less sensitivity but more acuity. In other words, the image fades because the cones aren't as sensitive to low light levels."

"Uh, right," Dipper said. If his Grunkle Ford had a fault, it was that occasionally, he told Dipper considerably more than he wanted to know. "Anyway, it was spooky, noticing them from the corner of our eyes but not being able to spot them if we looked at them—like they could just disappear."

"Merely an artifact of their weak light," Ford assured him. "They're still there—you just can't see them."

"Are they, you know,  _material_?" Dipper asked. "Or are they just, I don't know, some kind of plasma energy or something like that?"

"Ah! The plasma idea. Good thinking," Ford said. "But wrong. I mean, no, they don't seem to be plasmic in nature. I've checked for that, and my instruments show negative results. Now, as to their materiality, I'd say the answer is a definite maybe. It's very difficult to judge, but my measurements do indicate some weak, very minor atmospheric disturbances when these things move. It's not as strong as even a small swarm of gnats, but something is causing movements in the air, albeit very small movements. Like mushrooms."

"I probably shouldn't ask," Dipper said with a smile, "but, um,  _mushrooms?_ "

"Mushrooms create micro winds," Ford said.

"I—never heard that."

"Oh, yes, it's fascinating. Mushrooms depend on wind currents to spread their spores. However, many species of mushrooms grow in protected places, even caves, where the air is not often disturbed. They can release moisture from their gills; the moisture cools the air beneath the cap; the cool air sinks, and the spores are released to be carried by the air movement. It's not a strong wind, mind you—the air may move only a few millimeters a minute, but it's enough."

"Wow," Dipper said. "Mushrooms are smarter than I thought."

"Well, on a micro scale, they can control the weather. However, the glowing orbs seem to have another purpose, and they disturb the air more than a whole forest of mushrooms could do—though still so gently that I doubt you'd feel the breeze even if one were only an inch away from your face. Right now, I'm hazarding a guess that these things are material, but rapidly phase in and out of our plane of existence."

"Then they're interdimensional?" Dipper asked.

Ford shook his head. "That's tempting, but I'm not sure I'd go that far. If they were, I'm confident the shield would prevent them from entering the Mystery Shack, and yet they do enter."

"OK," Dipper said, frowning. "Can we reason this out? They're not interdimensional, but they can phase in and out of existence. Let's assume they're part of our dimension. If they're not flipping into another dimension, how else could they be phasing?"

"Possibly shifting between materiality and pure energy," Ford suggested. "At a high rate of cycling, they might have a kind of quasi-reality."

"How about time?" Dipper asked.

"It's six-twenty," Ford said, checking his watch.

"No, I mean I talked with Bill—well, with a part of him. The little bit that he put in me to start my heart beating that time I fought the Horroracle. He said he gave me four clues, and I wrote down exactly what he told me, as close as I could remember, and the word he repeated was 'time.'"

"You know, that _is_ an intriguing possibility," Ford said slowly. "If in our future the Time Baby wants to check on us—though heaven knows why he would want to—perhaps instead of sending members of his team back in time—since you say they're conspicuous—"

"They dress like extras in a  _Star Wars_ movie," Dipper said.

"—then perhaps these are—recording devices, maybe? What I don't understand, though, is why they cluster at this moment. Are we on the verge of another Armageddon?"

"I don't know," Dipper said. "Unless—maybe our confrontation with Brujo? Maybe that caused, um, ripples in the continuum?"

"It is possible, certainly," Ford said. "Yet we averted catastrophe. Maybe in the main time line the catastrophe actually occurred, and we lost? But somehow we skewed the time line so that Brujo perished instead?"

"Yeah, well, I'd say that was a good thing," Dipper told him.

"Too little data," Ford said. "If only we could capture one of these—these apparitions for examination. That might tell us something."

"Maybe we should ask Soos," Dipper suggested.

Ford chuckled. "Or perhaps better," he replied, "we should ask his Abuelita. She seems to have the folklore on these things down pat!" He paused and then added, "By the way, Stanley tells me there are new  _Star Wars_ movies out now. I loved them in college. Are the new ones as good?"

"Umm. . . ." Dipper said.

* * *

" _¡Me haces enojar tanto! ¡Salí!"_ Rosa Ramirez snapped, folding a newspaper and waving it like a fan to drive away the three hovering balls of light between her and her TV.

They flittered and spun, retreated to the corners of her room, and she sat down in her recliner again, grumbling to herself. Always when she had a moment to catch up on her telenovelas, always these annoying things showed up!

She seemed to have cowed them for the moment. They hovered in the corners of the room, but then one came to rest about three feet away from her left shoulder, as if it were watching TV with her.

She did not glance at it—if she did, she knew she would lose it, since with the room light on they were hard to see—but muttered in an angry tone, "If you want to watch the show, fine! But not between me and the screen! This is my television, you understand? My grandson Soos gave it to me! I don't mind sharing, but you cannot be a pig about it!"

However, reaching an accommodation with these things was impossible. Sure, it was silent, but it constantly bobbed up and down a few inches, and with her eyes focused on the TV screen, Abuelita could see it in her peripheral vision, and it was so annoying—like having a toddler tugging on your apron when you're busy cooking! It was a distraction!

The show ended, and with an irritated grunt, Abuelita reached for the remote and turned off the TV. As she did, she heard a tap at the door, and Soos said, "Abuelita? Are you, like, decent?"

"Come in,  _mi hijo_ ," she called. "Is fine."

He opened the door and stuck his head inside. "Uh, Abuelita, Mr. Doctor Pines and Dipper wanted to talk with you. Is it OK if they come in?"

"Yes," she said, mildly offended. "The room is clean! But there are more chairs in the parlor."

"OK, let's go talk there," Soos said. "Um, those light thingies, the brumas, are there any of them—oh, yeah, there's one!" He took off his cap and swatted at it, but it bobbed away. "Little smarty pants! OK, you light dudes come with us, 'cause we're talking about you anyways."

They settled in, Soos and Abuelita on the sofa and Ford and Dipper in armchairs, and Ford got right to the point: "Mrs. Ramirez, in all the stories you heard about brumas, is there any way of catching one?"

She shrugged. "No more ways than there are to throw a rope and catch a rainbow."

"Ooh, dawgs!" Soos said. "That would be, like, so awesome! If I caught a rainbow, I'd name mine 'Stripey!'"

"Are there any around right now?" Dipper asked.

"Were some in my room. Turn down the lights, we see."

Soos obligingly switched off the parlor lights, leaving only a little light seeping in from the dining room. "I see four, five, like, six of them."

Dipper could see them, too, hovering as though eavesdropping.

"Can you chase them away?" Ford asked.

"If I yell and wave a fan," she said. "Sometimes I chase them out a window, but they always come back again."

"Have you ever heard a story about anyone catching a bruma?" Ford asked.

She shook her head. "Never. My old aunt used to talk about them. She did not like them, said they brought  _desgracias_ , bad fortune, you know. She said there were many the month I was born. Then I saw more when I was a child and many, many when I met my husband and we planned to marry. And they go away for years and then come again." She was quiet for a moment, but then said softly, "The misfortunes, I had many with my husband. But no more than other people. I do not really believe the brumas cause these, but they are so—what is the word? Irritating!"

"Well," Ford mused, "if they can be blown away with a fan, perhaps they might be caught in a fine-mesh net. Thank you, Mrs. Ramirez—"

"Please. Abuelita, or Rosa," she said with a smile.

"Uh, would you wait here for me?" Dipper said. "I want to try something."

He went down the hall to Mabel's room. It wasn't locked—in fact, the door stood ajar—and he soon found what he needed, a big sketch pad and a packet of colorful markers. He tore a sheet from the pad, a big one, 18 x 24 inches, and wrote a message on it in block letters.

Then he replaced the pad and markers and carried his handiwork back to the parlor. It was still in darkness, and the six faint blue floating lights still milled around. "OK," Dipper said, "Soos, when I tell you, turn on the lights, please. Now—you brumas, you floating lights, you spies—here's a message! Please deliver it for me! Now, Soos."

Soos flicked the switch. Though Dipper had stood with his back to a wall, so the lights could focus on him—if they could see—he couldn't tell if they were paying attention or not, because they vanished from view. But he stood there holding his message still and hoping that, if they were some kind of time spies, this would work.

The message wasn't elaborate. It read

**URGENT!**

**TELL BLENDIN BLENJAMIN BLANDIN**

**HE NEEDS TO TALK TO DIPPER PINES**

**MONDAY AUGUST 10, 2015, MYSTERY SHACK**

**GRAVITY FALLS.**


	7. El Visitante

**Telenovela**

**By William Easley**

**(August 10, 2015)**

* * *

**7: El Visitante**

"So, this is, like, the time-travel dude that you and Mabel see now and then?" Wendy asked. "The pudgy guy we saw when we left the ghost town that time?"

Jogging back toward the Shack, Dipper said, "That's him."

"Think he can help us, Dip?"

"If he shows up—yes. He might know—something about the brumas." Dipper would have added his suspicions, but he lacked the wind for talking. They had done their nature run that morning, and they had pushed it.

"Gonna get back just in time," Wendy said, tilting her head back to glance at the sky. "Storms are comin' in."

That was true. The Monday morning had broken under sullen, cloudy skies, dark gray, pendulous, and threatening, and the air held a heavy feeling of moisture. If anything, the day had grown darker, not lighter, as Wendy and Dipper made their run. Though no rain had yet fallen, Dipper had the unmistakable sense that it would cut loose soon.

"They still—with us?" Dipper asked. He had run so hard that he couldn't tell—he had a sense of flashing lights at the edges of his vision, the result of their last long uphill sprint.

"Yeah, Dip. Six. Three on your side, three on mine. Four miles, dude. Let's walk it out."

"Might get caught in the rain."

"OK, then we get caught in the rain," she said, laughing as she slowed her pace. "We strained a little bit. Get your breath back."

"Don't want to sit in the bonfire glade," he said as he matched Wendy's stride and started walking.

"Yeah, not smart to get caught under trees in a thunderstorm."

They walked for about a hundred steps, and then he said, "I can see them now."

In the gloom of the cloudy morning, the lights showed, especially if he didn't look head-on at them. They hovered about six feet off the ground, gliding smoothly. About the time Wendy and Dipper passed the Bottomless Pit, the first gusts of the storm hit—no rain yet, but quick, hard blasts of wind. Dipper saw that the wind affected the lights. They jerked and bobbed with every rip of wind.

The first rain plopped down, heavy, big drops shooting down so hard they stung when they hit his arm. He and Wendy ran for the porch, a two-minute dash, and made it just before the downpour started, hammering gray rain that clattered on the roof and walls of the Shack. Gompers, the goat, jumped up on the porch and stared at them with accusing, slit-pupiled eyes. "Mbaaaa," he complained, obviously insinuating that this unpleasant weather was somehow their fault.

The teens settled onto the saggy old orange sofa to catch their breath. It felt pleasant, somehow, to be dry and safe while the world vanished in that pewter-gray shroud of falling, roaring rain. And to be sitting so close that they touched and could converse telepathically.

_OK, Dip, I get that you think Blendin Blandin might be able to tell you what these things are. But why'd you think of him?_

— _Bill Cipher suggested it. He kept repeating the word "time" when I talked to him. It might be a false lead, but who knows? Ford thinks that the things might come from the future, and from our own dimension. That would be how they could penetrate the force shield._

_Damn, there they are, all around us. Are they looking at us?_

— _Maybe. I don't know why, though._

_Well, dude, we're an attractive couple, you know? Cool, cultured older woman, smart, athletic young stud—_

Dipper couldn't help laughing.  _—Better not say that in front of Grunkle Stan or Grunkle Ford. Or, God forbid, Mabel!_

_Look at me._

That was always a welcome invitation. Dipper turned his head and gazed into Wendy's beautiful green eyes. She smiled dreamily, put her hand behind his head, and pulled him in for a long, lingering kiss.

"Wow," he murmured when it ended.

"How'd you like the show, light dudes?" Wendy asked. "Ha! Look! They came in for a closer look!"

They were within arm's length. Wendy moved faster than Dipper could imagine, spinning around and clapping her hands on one of the things and trapping it—for an instant.

Then she yelped, "Yow!" and hurriedly let it go, shaking both hands. "Damn thing shocked me! I think it burned my hands!" She held out her palms, which looked extraordinarily pink.

"You OK?" Dipper asked.

"Yeah, I think so," she said, still flapping her hands. "It felt weird, Dip. It sort of—well, I don't know how to—ever caught a moth in your cupped hands?"

"Um, no," Dipper said.

"Here, let me show you a memory," Wendy said, laying her hand along his neck. "Ow. Still stings a little. Get this." She closed her eyes.

Through her palm a memory flowed into Dipper's mind.

_Wendy, about six years old, exceptionally tall and gawky, the tallest kid in the first grade—heck, about the tallest even if you included the second- third- and fourth-graders! Out on her own on the fringes of the forest, just at dawn. She sees an enchanting tan moth, marked with dark-brown diamonds, resting on the stem of a weed. She creeps close, cups her hands, and catches it for a better look. It throbs inside her hand-trap, the wings fluttering and the heavy body twitching. Not wanting to harm it, she lets it go and watches it fly away._

"Like that," Wendy said, moving her hand from his neck. "Except it hurt, too, like an electric shock."

"It was something real, though," Dipper said. "You know, material. Whoa!" A lash of wind had sprayed them with cold rain. They both jumped up off the sofa and dashed for the door. "Let's get inside. I'll call Ford and let him know that you touched one."

They both took quick showers, he upstairs, she down, and then got dressed. No one else stirred—Mondays were off days for the Shack and its staff, since the tourist trap got very little tourist traffic on Mondays after about the first of August. They moved quietly, not putting on their shoes, and went to sit at a table in the little snack bar, not wanting to disturb anyone else.

"Sounds like Soos is awake, though," Wendy said as she brought a couple of mugs of coffee in from the kitchen. "I think he's stomping around."

Dipper tilted his head and listened. "That would be Waddles," he told her. "Mabel always sneaks her pigs inside when there's going to be bad weather. Waddles is so big now that I think he's kind of uncomfortable inside, but you can't tell Mabel that." He took out his phone and laid it on the table.

"Not too early, dude?" Wendy asked. "It's not yet seven-thirty."

"Grunkle Ford always says to call him day or night if there's new data. I'll wait for ten minutes, though. He's usually up by seven-thirty, and that way I won't wake Lorena. How are your hands?"

She held them up. The pink had faded, though the skin still looked irritated. "Doesn't hurt, but it itches a little. I think the thing just shocked me so's it could get away. If it hadn't surprised me, I would've tried to stash it someplace."

He took her right hand in his and pressed his lips to her palm. "Sorry you got hurt."

She caressed his cheek. "It wasn't _critical_ , Dip!"

They sipped their coffee—Wendy knew he liked a glug of milk in his, more than she put in her own cup. "Good coffee," he told her.

"Yeah, I'll tell you the secret some time," she said, raising an eyebrow as she grinned.

The first fury of the rainstorm passed over, and a steady shower replaced it. Through the window they could see as far as the driveway, and the sky had lightened. The gurgle of rain running off the eaves replaced the thunder of the first downpour. It was almost peaceful.

A few minutes later, Dipper punched in Ford's number. However, he heard an error tone, and a high-pitched, stammering voice said, "The n-n-number you have dialed is—is tem—temporarily not a-a-available. Please wait and try—try your call—"

"Blendin!" Dipper exclaimed. "Come on, man, I know it's you!"

"Speak of the devil," Wendy said—because with a flash of blue-white light, a pudgy guy in coveralls and thick goggly glasses, holding a cell phone in his left hand, had materialized in the snack bar, knocking over a stack of paper cups and scattering a container of drinking straws all over the floor.

"Oh, time fu-fu-fudge!" the guy stammered. "Wait one time-minute and I'll fuh-fix this."

He fiddled with an instrument clipped to his belt, a transparent pinkish bubble formed around him, and inside it time rewound. A second after the cups and straws had jumped back into place and he had blinked out of existence, he materialized again, this time without the phone and about a foot farther away from the counter and the items he'd bumped. "That's better!" he pronounced. "O-o-okay, Dipper, you guh-got me. What—what—what gave it away?"

"Sit down and we'll talk," Dipper said. "Coffee?"

Blendin settled onto a chair at their table. His chubby face looked strained and greasy, and dampness plastered down his brown hair—he probably hadn't been out in the rain, so Dipper guessed he had been sweating. "That—that would be nice," he muttered. "Uh, three sugars? Please?"

"I got it," Wendy said, getting up.

"Wait a second. Blendin, this is—"

"Wendy Corduroy," Blendin said. "I know. We briefly met once, and I've seen a lot of you since then, though you, you, you didn't kn-know it. I, I, I'm Blendin Blenjamin Blandin, a visitor from—from—from the fu—future! Th—that's all you nuh-need to time-know."

"Pleased to meet you," Wendy said, rolling her eyes at Dipper. "Coffee coming up."

The rain momentarily beat harder, and distant thunder rumbled as Wendy walked away from the table. As soon as she went into the kitchen, Dipper asked Blendin, "Are those lights yours? Did you send them?"

"Ye-yes and nuh-no," Blendin said. "They're part of the Tuh-Time Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Squadron's—h-hey, I duh-didn't stuh-stam—stammer that time! Uh, p-part of our ars—arsenal."

"Weapons?" Dipper asked, shocked.

Blendin looked shocked. "Huh? Oh, nuh-no, they're not armed."

"Here you go," Wendy said, setting down a steaming question-mark mug in front of Blendin.

"Thanks," he said, sipping from it.

"That's gonna be hot!" Wendy warned a half-second too late.

"Ooh, ooch!" Blendin said, managing to gulp down the scalding coffee. "Hah! Whew! Ow! One se-second!" He repeated the action with the belt device, flickered out of existence, and then back in, with the cup halfway to his lips. "I'll wuh-wait for that to coo-cool," he said, carefully setting it back on the table.

"What are you doing with that thing?" Dipper asked, pointing to the silvery box attached to his belt. It wasn't a time-tape.

Blendin glanced down. "Oh, th-this is nuh-new since the last time we ta-talked. It's a muh-Mulliganizer. A do—do-over de-device. It buh-backs things up a few se-seconds just for muh-me."

"Dude," Wendy said, "take a deep breath. It's hard to understand you."

Blendin gave an apologetic nod. "Suh-sorry. My sta-stammer gets worse when I'm suh-stressed. So-something happened in this time-line, and we're not sure what-what it will had to be is."

"Come again?"

"It's time talk," Dipper said, rubbing his eyes. "For time travelers, it's hard to tell whether verbs should be past, present, or future, or all at once."

"Man," Wendy said sympathetically. "That's a tense situation."

"You're te-telling me," Blendin said, blowing on his coffee. He cautiously sniffed it like a wine connoisseur appreciating the bouquet of a fine vintage, and then took a careful sip. He smacked his lips. His round face relaxed into a broad smile. "This is, uh, excuse me, da-da-dang good coffee!" He took a deeper swig. "I muh-mean, I've had cups of c-coffee all through history, and thuh-this is one of the buh-best!"

"It's just coffee, dude," Wendy said. "I didn't mean to interrupt. What were you saying?"

"About what?" Blendin asked.

"You said something got screwed up our time-line," Dipper told him. "What was it?"

"Did I suh-say that?" Blendin asked, looking puzzled. "No, no, I duh-didn't. I suh-said something hap- _happened_  in this time-line that we c-can't understand, th-that's all. It involves the Ramirez family. Uh, Rosa and her grandson Soos."

"We know who they are," Dipper said. "What happened to them?"

"Uh, well, nothing, maybe. We just duh-don't know! And it's my ruh-responsibility! See, somehow, and we can't exactly p-pinpoint it, Soos's thought p-patterns ch-changed. Th-that's im-important because he-he does something later in his luh-life that affects the fu-future. We nuh-need to know if what hap-happened will have an effect on what it is to be he will have done."

Before Wendy could request clarification, Dipper ask, "So you sent these floating light things back in time just to spy on everybody?"

"Ye-yes. We-well, originally. Then it got to be popular."

" _Spying_ on us?" Wendy asked. "Dude, that is very uncool!"

"We're trying to fuh-fix things! We're working on it!" Blendin said. "The time-problem is this: some of the crew who mon-monitor the imaging got to luh-like watching you, guh-guys, and they told others and some, some equipment disappeared, and nuh-now everybody's tuning in to suh-see what's happening in Gravity Falls! It's a buh-big time hit!"

"Like a TV show?" Wendy asked.

Dipper put his head down on the table. To the wood surface, he said flatly, "You're telling us that our lives have become a telenovela."

"Buh-buh-buh-Bingo!" Blandin said. "Um—maybe another c-cup of coffee, Wendy? And is there any chu-cherry puh-pie?"


	8. Soos y Blendin

**Telenovela**

**By William Easley**

**(August 10, 2015)**

* * *

 

**8: Soos y Blendin**

As it happened, Abuelita had made a cherry pie the day before, and one slice remained. Wendy warmed it up, Blendin ate it with little "num-nums" of appreciation, and then he sighed. "Thanks. N-now I, I, I feel much more relaxed. OK, I'd better admit the whole thing. S-see, the idea of the OB-Servers was that th-they'd m-make it possible for the TPAES personnel to monitor k-key points and people in history without showing up personally. Th-that's always a problem, because the l-least little mistake that one of us time travelers make might ch-change the whole p-pattern of the future."

"The Butterfly Effect," Wendy said, nodding.

"Yes. Uh, what?" Blendin asked.

Wendy glanced at Dipper, silently telling him "You're the explainer." Dipper cleared his throat. "Well, let's say that someone went back to the Triassic Period to hunt dinosaurs and accidentally stepped on and killed a butterfly. That one little change could have drastic results."

Blendin just stared at him. "Um, no. Bugs are a blatzfick a d-dozen. Th-that wouldn't change much at all."

"Oh," Dipper said, deflating a little. "What did you mean, then?"

"Oh, well, if a time t-traveler got distracted or injured, they m-might, uh, for example drop a p-piece of future equipment that the l-locals could find and misuse. I mean—not to s-start a fight or anything, because that's all wuh-water under the b-bridge, you know—for example a c-couple of kids might f-find a time tape and use it to ch-change h-history, and then s-somebody would have to go back and fix all their anomalies up again."

"What kids?" Wendy asked suspiciously.

"That—doesn't matter," Dipper said hastily. "So—what about these, what did you call them, observers, then?"

"I, I, I said OB-servers. They, they're like tri-D holographic image recorders. If, if they find something that's p-potentially disruptive to the time line, then we can s-send agents back to f-fix things. They're highly classified. Except. Uh."

"Blendin!" Mabel's voice, cutting in from the doorway. She was still in her sleep shirt and shorty pajamas. "Hiya! How's Time Baby? Ooh, did you get the general and the president back home again? That mining town was fun! Hey, some time could you take me to see Hamilton? Not the show, the guy?"

"H-hello, M-Mabel," Blendin said. "Uh, I was just, you know, visiting for a cup of coffee—"

"Breakfast!" Mabel said. "Who's on kitchen duty? I'm hungry! I want waffles! No, scrambled eggs and turkey sausage! No, oatmeal! What am I talking, oatmeal? I got it—Oatmeal waffles and scrambled eggs and sausage! Who's gonna cook it?"

"You," Wendy suggested.

"Aw, man! Hey, Blendin, you're gonna hang around for breakfast, right?"

"I, I, I shouldn't—"

"C'mon!" Mabel said. "You've got— _time_. Wink, wink!"

"You might as well," Dipper said.

With a shy smile, Blendin said apologetically, "Um—I don't want to be a b-bother, but could I have French toast? We don't have it in the f-future, you know, since the chickens gained personhood."

"Yeah, I'll cook it," Wendy said. "C'mon, Mabes. You and me in the kitchen!"

"Women get stuck with all the scut work," Mabel complained.

"Hey," Dipper said. "When you had the flu last winter, I made you breakfast in bed every morning!"

"Doesn't count," Mabel said. "That was in the past!"

When the girls had gone into the kitchen, Blendin took out a handkerchief and wiped his face. "M-Mabel is high time-energy," he observed.

"Tell me about it. OK, I think I see where this is going. The OB-servers somehow got out of control, didn't they?"

"Um—in a way. S-see, the controllers got interested in certain things. We, we always keep an eye on G-Gravity F-Falls because it's one of the hot spots for anomalies. And the Ramirez family is important to us for reasons that won't happen for decades, and I can't s-say anything about that, s-so we track them, too. B-but recently some of the controllers, uh, snuck some OB-servers off site. Th-they were due to be replaced, anyhow, b-but they s-still work, and there's an underground t-traffic now in OB-server footage on the DimensioNet—that's like the Internet, but more future-y. So, so people are wuh-watching the footage the way you guys watch holovision—wait, this is what year?"

"It's 2015," Dipper said.

"Uh, what came before holovision? Teladio?"

"Television," Dipper said. "And the Internet, and Youtube and yada yada yada."

"R-right," Blendin said. "W-well, it's like that. And we're trying to t-track down the m-machines and p-put a stop to it, b-but they're programmed to evade, so it's difficult. Uh, by the way, the 'Wendy and Dipper' show w-won a Nommy award recently."

Dipper closed his eyes. "How long has this been going on?"

"W-well—the s-show's a year old. I th-think the shower episode was what won the prize, though. That one and the hot-tub episode were all-time favorites."

Dipper turned red and clapped his hand on his forehead. "Don't. Tell. Wendy," he said very clearly. "Don't. Ever. Tell. Wendy!"

"Top of the, like, morning, Dipper!" Soos, just coming in. That was the normal order for the Shack on an off day: Dipper always up first, then Mabel, then Soos, and maybe an hour later, Melody and the kids and Abuelita. They took every chance to rest, since they almost always had to juggle several things each day. "Rainy day, huh? Oh, hi, Time Dude! Long time, no see, dawg!"

"Good m-morning, Mr. R-Ramirez," Blendin said.

Soos laughed. "Oh, dawg, it's Soos, please!"

Blendin frowned. "Uh, let's see, I have hair, so this is after Globnar, right? Yes, you, you, you were twelve then, D-Dipper, I r-remember. Uh, how's the infinite pizza, Soos?"

Soos smiled sadly. "Dude, this one time we had, like, the end of the world or some junk? And I, like, wandered the wastelands doing good deeds and helping folks survive, and I met this one poor dude who hadn't had anything to eat in days, and he needed it more than I did, so I gave it to him. Dude runs a pizza restaurant now."

Blendin blinked. "That was incredibly k-kind of you!"

"Aw, it was just somthin' I could do to help," Soos said with a shrug. "That's why they wrote a folk song about me! Hey, Dipper, get your guitar."

"Uh, maybe later," Dipper said. "Blendin was just telling me that there are these sort of robotic cameras flying around and he's trying to figure out a way to get rid of them."

"Oh, man!" Soos said. "Is that what Abuelita's brumas are?"

"How did you g-guess that?" Blendin asked, sounding astonished. "It's not l-like you to make a reasonable j-jump like that! Mentally, I mean."

Soos shrugged good-naturedly. "Dunno, dawg. It's, like, something that happened when we were fighting that bad wizard guy, Brujo? You know, to prepare, the members of the Zodiac—do you know about the Zodiac?"

"The C-Cipher wheel?" Blendin asked nervously.

"That's it," Dipper said. "Me, Wendy, Mabel, our Grunkles, Soos, Dr. McGucket, Pacifica, Gideon, and now Teek are on it."

"I, I, I don't remember m-much about W-Weirdmageddon," Blendin confessed. "B-because of the thing that hap-happened to Time Baby and then a few duh-days later you and Mabel helped it un-happen, but s-stretches of all that are a bl-blank. But yes, I know what the C-Cipher Wheel is."

"Well, get this," Soos said. "It was, like, my idea and junk, you know? See, this is so cool, dude, we all, like, shared qualities with each other. And I think I picked up some smarts from Dr. Pines and maybe Dipper, and now I can tinker lots better than I used to 'cause I got some skills from Dr. Old Man McGucket, and all. So maybe that's—"

"That explains the anomaly!" Blendin exclaimed. He beamed. "What a r-relief! The p-people you m-mentioned—they t-turn out fine—all the qualities you shared are p-positive! You're still you!"

"Who?" Soos asked.

"You who!"

Soos chuckled. "You don't have to yodel, man. I'm, like, right here!" He pointed to his head. "See? Little bit of Mabel! Boosh! The jokes just come to me, boom, like that!"

"Breakfast is up," Wendy called.

Dipper didn't care for the oatmeal waffles—too dense and chewy—but he scarfed down scrambled eggs with cheese and a couple of slices of turkey bacon and some wheat toast. Wendy had the same. Soos plowed through a little of everything, as did Mabel. As for Blendin, he ate his French toast with tears in his eyes. "Not since I was a boy!" he murmured. And he polished off another two cups of Wendy's tasty coffee.

By the time they finished, the last of the rain had eased out of the Valley. Blendin stood and thanked them. "I, I, I have to go back to Headquarters," he said. "It's currently in the year 3010, and we're prepping for what will be have happening in 3012. That's a b-big year! Anyway, I'll clear this case, so the official OB-servers won't b-be around as much. N-not at all for a f-few days. The unofficial ones—"

"We'll work on that," Dipper said. "Now that we know what they are."

"They're impossible to c-capture," Blendin said.

"Not so much," Wendy said. "I grabbed one, but it burned my hands and I had to let it go."

"D-don't try that!" Blendin said. "It's the energy orb—it could really h-hurt you if you expose your, um, your, bare skin to it. Well, if you were in the shower or something, the water would protect you—I've said too much."

"We noticed they blew around in the wind, though," Dipper said.

"Well, y-yes, that's true, they're material enough to b-be affected by wind currents," Blendin agreed. "But you can't very well carry fans around everywhere you go."

“Let’s talk for just a few minutes,” Dipper said, and he and Blendin walked out onto the porch and put their heads together.

A few minutes later, Blendin again thanked everyone, and Soos, Wendy, and Dipper walked him out to the front lawn, still soggy from the rain. Mabel was out back, urging Waddles and Widdles to exercise—she'd started to worry about how much weight they were gaining. They were doing their favorite aerobic activity, puddle wallowing.

"Th-thank you all," Blendin said for the third time. "S-sincerely. Right, right now I'm the commander of the TPAES because Time Baby is still waiting to wake up, but, but I've s-seen the future and when that time comes, he's going to be really, really grouchy. B-but I don't think he'll destroy civilization this t-time around. We have a secret p-plan to prevent that. I can't say more right now, but one of these d-days, Dipper, I'll see you and Mabel again."

"Any time, dude," Dipper said.

"Oh, man, good one!" Soos said, nudging Dipper. "We ought to write these down, dawg!"

"Hey, man," Wendy said to Blendin, "can you give us a clue about how me and Dipper do in the future?"

Blendin smiled. "Um. Lots of peppermint!" For a moment he looked worried, but then he said, "You two—I'm trusting you to find a way to disable those OB-servers. You, you, you may have to get McGucket's help, I don't know. I'll keep one official OB-server in Gravity Falls—I'm cracking down on the guy, guys who smuggled out the illicit ones—but I promise it'll respect your p-privacy. You won’t s-see the legitimate one for at least a wuh-week. Any you s-spot in the next few days, you can destroy, if you can figure out a way to do it."

"Hey, man," Dipper said. "I think I just came up with a plan. Let's walk over here." They went a few steps away and Dipper whispered into Blendin's ear. The chubby time-traveler’s habitually worried expression cleared, and he smiled and nodded.

"That might w-work to get them t-together!" he said. "B-but once they’ve gathered, how, how do you plan on capturing them?"

Dipper asked quietly, "Can they travel through time?"

"If, if, if they're in a known place and time," Blendin said. "But, but, there's a lag between 3010 and 2015. If the controller in 3010 calls one b-back, it t-takes about three m-minutes before it responds. Two, two minutes and fifty-five seconds, to be exact. If you can somehow destroy it in those few minutes, that would be f-fine."

"OK," Dipper said. "Tonight, then. You know where. We'll put our minds to it."

"You, you better step back," Blendin said, taking a device from his belt. "This is a first-generation model, and it has a pretty big sph-sphere. Good luck!"

"You, too," Dipper said, walking over to rejoin Wendy and Soos.

Blendin waved, zipped out the time tape a few inches, and vanished.

"I knew I'd met that dude a long time ago!" Soos said. "He, like, rode on one of the carnival rides! The rusty buckets! I remember! It was that time that Dipper accidentally gave you a black eye, Wendy!"

"That whole day was pretty amazing," Wendy said. "'Course Mabel, Dipper, and me saw him later, too, back during the ghost town deal, but he and I didn't really get acquainted then."

"Time travelers tend to cloud your memory," Dipper said. "After a while, the details really fade out. Chances are we won't recall much about his visit after a couple of weeks go by."

Wendy shook her head, smiling. "Too bad. He seems kinda nice, in an incompetent way."

"Wish I had a tape measure like he's got," Soos mused. "Hmm. Maybe I could figure out how to make one." He shrugged. "Eh, it'd be a big project, and I’m real busy right now. Maybe someday after our kids are older . . .."


	9. La comedia de esta noche fue escrita por Mabel Pines

**Telenovela**

**By William Easley**

**(August 10, 2015)**

* * *

**9:** _**La comedia de esta noche fue escrita por Mabel Pines** _

For better or worse, Mabel got wind of Dipper's plans and sat in on their development. She even phoned Teek and canceled a picnic with him, though Dipper assured her nothing would happen until dark. "Nuts to that!" she exclaimed. "I have work to do! Soos! Help me connect my laptop to the printer!"

"Sure thing, Hambone," he said cheerfully. "Just bring it up to the office, and I'll make sure it's working. We'll use the inkjet and not that funky copier-printer with the moths in it. I don't know how they multiply the way they do! Uh—what are you printing?"

Mabel handed him her laptop. "It's not written yet! Just get the computer on and make sure it's got a printer connection. You take care of the electronics—I gotta brew up some Mabel Juice!"

As Soos and Mabel left, Wendy asked Dipper, "She always like this?" as if she didn't know.

Dipper, scribbling away at a list on a yellow legal pad, just shrugged. "She seems a little more random lately. Maybe when we did that quality-swap thing she got a touch of my wanting to be a writer." His face turned a little pink. "Oh—speaking of that—I heard from both my agent and my editor this morning. Emails."

"You," Wendy said, "are the only person in the whole world who could say that sentence to me and make me believe it. Good news, I hope?"

"Well, yeah." Dipper couldn't help grinning. "The sales of  _Bride of the Zombie_ are already so strong that the publisher's gone into a second printing and they want me to agree to write three more books in the series after the next two come out. And my agent is negotiating a better deal. Oh, and there's even a little interest in making a TV movie or something from the first book. Plus, I got my editor's notes and requests for rewrites for  _It Lurked in the Lake._ "

"Lot of rewriting?"

Dipper shook his head. "Not really all that much. It'll be about like revising the first book. It's mainly tweaks and correcting some typos and errors. Got to cut the first three paragraphs because they summarize the previous book, so I'll work that info in a little at a time. I figure a couple of weeks in September should do it, after I get back home. They want it by October 15, but I'll get it in early."

"What kind of changes?" Wendy asked.

Dipper rubbed his neck. "Wellll . . . I'll give you an example. OK, so I called Fiddleford McGucket 'Fiddlerfoot McBucket.' My editor says I have to change that name, 'cause kids the age of my readers would make something dirty out of it. I'm thinking maybe Madison McBuckle. That would be harder to turn into—"

"McSuckit," Wendy said, giggling. "Or McF—"

" _That's_  the idea," Dipper said hastily. "And he can still be 'Old Man McBuckle,' or maybe 'Mad-Man McBuckle.'"

"I think kids'll like this book," said Wendy, who had proofread it. "Reading about what happened, I'm sorry I missed that first fishing opener you guys went to. Sounds like a real adventure."

Chewing on his pen, Dipper replied, "Yeah, best part was when Mabel and Soos drove the wreck of Soos's first boat right through the waterfall. There's really a cave behind it, by the way. Sort of a nice sandy beach, if you don't mind relaxing next to a gigantic metal Gobblewonker. Or did McGucket salvage it? I don't remember. Interesting cave, anyhow."

Wendy, leaning back in her chair with her elbow bent and propped on the back, asked, "Really? Dude, you gotta take me there! Show me! Show me! Show me!"

"OK, before summer ends," Dipper said, underlining something on his list. "It's a promise. Uh, it'd be private, so your, uh, your red, uh—" he trailed off in a mumble.

"Bikini!" Wendy said with a laugh. "It's called a bikini. You can say the word, Dip. Sure, if you'll take me to visit the beach, I'll wear it. It's a date!"

Later, after Dipper had made his list and checked it twice, they made some plans for a picnic outing of their own—if they could find a waterproof picnic basket. They didn't get into more specifics than that.

But they talked while they were alone, doing little odd jobs around the Shack. That term, "odd job," means something special in the Mystery Shack, like changing the Sascrotch's tighty-whitey shorts (kids were prone to besmirching them, especially if they had a chocolate ice-cream cone handy) or giving the eyeballs fresh water (rather, a dilute saline solution—the eyeballs seemed obscurely grateful, Dipper thought). Checking the Fiji mermaid for popped seams. Tightening the antlers on the stuffed jackrabbit. Little tasks like that. Really weird, bizarre, way-out odd jobs that seemed boring at the time, but Dipper knew he would miss them over the coming school year.

He'd miss those odd jobs and his beautiful red-haired Lumberjack Girl. He tried not to think about how fast the end of summer was coming up. His and Mabel's sixteenth birthday was bearing down on them like an oncoming locomotive.

After lunch, early that afternoon, they conferred in whispers with Abuelita, in a room so dark that—they believed—any lurking bruma would be visible. They saw none, and so believed themselves out of visual and—they hoped—auditory range.

"They are from the future, these things?" Abuelita asked, with a quizzical expression. One thing about her having lived in Gravity Falls so long—she didn't for a moment seem to think that was impossible.

"That's what the time dude told us," Wendy assured her. "Thing is, your family is, like, famous in the future."

"Because of Soos," Dipper told her. "At some point in the future he does something really important and great, but we don't know what."

" _Mi hijo!"_ Abuelita said, fondly. "Always have I known that he was especial! He is such a good grandson! I am so proud of him!"

"That's why the brumas visited you in Mexico, even when you were young," Dipper said. "The future people knew that you were destined to get married to Soos's grandfather, and that your daughter would be Soos's mother, and that made you important, too. That's why the future people love to watch you."

"Like a story on the television!" Abuelita said, catching on immediately. Then in the dimness she frowned. "But the actors on the television, they get paid much money! Is no fair!"

They all blinked as the door open, letting a glare of light and a bouncing Mabel in. "Hello!" she said, brandishing a sheaf of paper. "Almost ready for the table read!"

"Shut the door, man!" Wendy said.

"Sorry!" Mabel kicked the door closed behind her.

"Let's hold on a few minutes," Dipper warned. "We'll let our eyes adjust. One of them might have followed Mabel in."

As they waited, Wendy said, "Abuelita, you could also think of the brumas as guardian angels. Keeping an eye on your family, making sure that nothing bad happened to Soos."

"Sí, that is a point," Abuelita said grudgingly.

"But the trouble," Dipper said, "is that because lots of future people like to watch these, uh, telenovelas, some bad future guys stole some of the equipment, sent it all back to spy on us, and now everyone in the future keeps looking at us all the time."

"Bad! Bad future time guys! Boo!" Mabel jeered. "Peeping Toms from the future make the present tense! Ha! See what I did there?"

"I think we're past that joke already," Wendy told her gently.

"OK, so our plan is this," Dipper said, unfolding his list. It was a little too dark in the room to read it, but he opened it up from habit. "Tonight we want to lure all the brumas in our present time here to the Mystery Shack. We can get rid of the bad ones all at once. That's going to be possible because the official one, which won't pry into our private lives, is going to be grounded."

"What means this ground dead?" Abuelita asked.

"That means it's gotta sit this one out!" Mabel said. She quickly worked herself up to a frenzy: "It's like this: No peeking, no eavesdropping, no going out after dark with a boy or with your girl friends, or anyone, Mabel, and _NO_ dates with a _BOY_ until June, and I don't care if it _IS_ the prom, young lady!" She was breathing hard.

"Geeze, Mabel," Dipper said, "dial it down a notch or two! Let it go! Come on! You  _got_  to go to the prom! Dad eased up!"

"Yeah, but it was so close," Mabel said, still panting, a crazed look in her eyes. She waved both her arms and yelled, "I nearly got as grounded as a lightning rod!"

"Sounds like she's still got some Fiddleford in her brain," Wendy murmured. "By crackity!"

Evidently giving up on understanding Mabel (as countless others before her had done), Abuelita said, "But when we lure them in—"

Dipper turned back to Abuelita. "Then we have to trap them, and that's where you come in. It all has to be done real fast. We have a total of three minutes."

He explained, and Abuelita, intent on his words, nodded. "Oh, I can do this!" she said. "If you get them in one place and then if you also take care of them after!"

"Wendy and I will see to that," Dipper said.

"Yeah, but we have to get 'em to show up first," Wendy added. "And we need all of them, so we gotta attract them. From things the time traveler guy said, we're guessing we have to deal with between twelve and twenty of them. Now, for some reason they really like watchin' Dip and me."

"Ha! Wendippers, every one!" Mabel crowed. "Future shippers!" She cackled with laughter, and Dipper wondered if she'd already been into the Mabel Juice.

"Shh," Dipper said. He didn't want to go into the whole question of  _shipping_ , a minor obsession of Mabel's ever since she, Wendy, and Dipper had visited what they usually called the Comic Book Dimension—not really a dimension of comic books, but one in which they had visited a strange world where everyone was  _born_ with five fingers and where the three of them had spent most of their time at a Comic Con, hanging out with an ersatz Soos. He was actually a cosplayer, because In that world, Gravity Falls existed as a wildly popular TV cartoon, featuring versions of Mabel, Dipper, and Wendy as characters.

But a grinning Mabel was not to be sidetracked. "C'mon, Brobro!  _Everybody_  knows now! Well, everybody but Mom! The two of you are so in  _love_!" She poked Dipper's nose. "Boop! Boop!"

Wendy warned good-naturedly, "Girl, you reach out to boop  _my_  nose, you'll pull back a stump!"

" _You_  still have some Grunkle Stan rattling around in your head," Dipper told her.

"I'll be good," Mabel promised, settling back in her chair.

Dipper resumed: "As I was saying, we have to spread the word of something special that will attract these things. Now, don't get upset at our plan, Abuelita, because we think it's the one thing that will work. Whenever anybody glimpses one of those glowing lights, here's what we have to do—"

"And remember," Mabel said, interrupting him to distribute copies of her script, "it's all make-believe! Like a telenovela!"

* * *

They had mutually decided that neither Grunkle Stan nor Grunkle Ford should be involved with what they planned to do. Grunkle Stan would insist on punching the insubstantial things out—which wouldn't work and might even injure him—and Grunkle Ford would try to keep one captive and observe it, which might result in a major time-paradox problem.

Melody was dubious, Abuelita was on board though a little reluctant once she understood what deception the plan required, and Soos was enthusiastic from the beginning and asked if he could DJ the production.

" _Might_  be overkill," Mabel said, letting him down easy. "But tell you what: You can be the floor manager!"

"Yes!" Soos said, punching the air. "Outstanding! What does one of them do?"

"You manage the floor," Mabel explained. "First, make sure it's picked up and clean. Then we'll need to put down strips of painter's tape on the attic floor with Wendy's and Dipper's names on them and number them from, let's see, one to eleven. I'll show you where they go. See, Wendy and Dip have to hit their marks on certain lines. That'll give the whole thing a sense of completely natural, passion-drenched, pulsating life!"

"Sorry about this," Dipper said to Wendy.

"Hey, it's our audition for the big time," Wendy replied, giving his arm a light punch.

Dipper chuckled weakly. "Yeah, well, if we make it—no more nude scenes for me!"

"Not in public anyway," Wendy replied with her mischievous grin.

Melody took the kids over to the McGucket house for the evening, and the others got busy with rehearsal. The preparations really started after they'd run through the script three times, right around  five in the afternoon, when Abuelita was in her room trying to watch TV. She spotted just one of the pale blue lights and immediately called out, "Oh, Mabel! Are you close by?"

"That's my cue!" Mabel said in the parlor, and fueled by about a quart of Mabel Juice, she jumped off the sofa and raced to Abuelita's room.

She threw open the door dramatically and said the lines she had written herself: "Abuelita! You sound distressed! Are you  _concerned_  about something?"

"Yes!" Abuelita said, matching Mabel's dramatics. "I did not wish to say anything, but I cannot keep this to myself. It is such tragic news! And it concerns—your brother Dipper!"

"Dun-dun DUHNNNN!" Mabel said, toeing the strip of tape that Soos had put on the floor. "What? Do you mean my brother, who is in love with the beautiful red-haired girl Wendy?"

Abuelita said her lines a little woodenly, but intensely: "Yes! That is what I mean! This may be wrong of me, but I by accident overheard something that causes me great sorrow. I should not reveal such a secret, but shall I tell you?"

"Yes! You can trust me, Abuelita! What is it? Share your sorrow!"

With a very convincing catch in her throat, Abuelita said, "Ay, me, I by chance overheard Dipper and Wendy planning to consummate their love tonight!"

"But they're not married!" Mabel exclaimed, raising her arm and putting the back of her right hand against her forehead. "Oh! This could ruin poor Wendy's reputation!"

"And your brother's as well!"

"Nah!" Mabel said, making a rocking gesture with her hand. "He could use the street cred. Anyway, if he boasted about nailing a beautiful girl, nobody would ever believe a nerd like him! But do you mean they are going to get completely nude and do the horizontal Hokey Pokey?"

"Yes!" Abuelita looked puzzled. In a more normal tone, she whispered, "What means this hokum-polka?"

"Stick to the script!" Mabel mouthed. Aloud, she said, "It means they will be totally unclothed and will slake their carnal thirst!"

"He will  _slake_ her?" Abuelita asked, sounding realistically horrified. Actually she _was_ horrified, her English vocabulary not ever having included the verb "to slake."

"Oh, she will be slaked! But there is no way we can stop them! For  _she_  is of age!" Mabel declaimed. "And Dipper is his own man. Kid. Teen. There seems to be nothing we can do to break up this origami!" Mabel had seen the word "orgy" in print before and had a confused impression that it meant enthusiastic affection, but she didn't quite remember how to spell it and was typically careless in checking an online dictionary.

"They say they will begin," Abuelita said, "on the stroke of nine!"

"Hah! 'Stroke!'" Mabel winked, savoring her own writing skill. "Shhh—look, Abuelita, there it goes!"

For the last part of this exchange, the ball of blue light had been quivering, as though in antici . . . pation. Now it shot off at high speed. "Yes!" Mabel chortled. "It's gonna go tell the others!"

"How can you be sure of this?" Abuelita asked in a whisper.

"Lady," Mabel assured her, "I've spent two years in a high school. When a guy and girl are building up to the big moment, I  _know_ how the bow-chicka-bow-wow grapevine works! I gotta tell Dip."

She found him—not difficult, he and Wendy were still sitting on the sofa—and whispered that the ball was rolling. They turned down the lights, Mabel concealed herself behind the sofa, where she found a handful of jelly beans that Little Soos had lost the previous Easter, ate them, and within five minutes three of the glowing orbs drifted in.

"Sorry about this," Dipper murmured softly to Wendy. Then more loudly he said, "Oh, Wendy, my light, my life, my love! Give your body to me and let us realize our forbidden passion! Our desire is too strong to resist any farther.  _Psst,_  Mabel, that should be 'further.'"

The back of the couch bumped him as Mabel punched from the other side. "Shh!"

"Oh, my Big Dipper!" Wendy said, her hands clasped and held up to her heart. "My lions burn for you" (Mabel also had a mild case of dyslexia when on Mabel Juice).

"Oh, my angel!" Dipper said. "Do your mean your answer is—"

"Yes! Yes! Let us strip to our bare heated flesh and hug and kiss and do all the junk that lovers do! To each other! Is nine o'clock good for you, dude?"

"It is, my dearest darling!" Dipper exclaimed. "Up in the attic!"

Wendy clenched him in a tight embrace. "You will take me higher than the attic! You will waft me to heaven!"

"Until then, my red-haired angel!"

"Until then, my passionate devil!"

Mabel, hiding behind the sofa, whispered, "The line is 'passionate putz!'"

" _Not_ gonna say that," Wendy whispered back. "I dated Mark Epstein, and I know what it means!"

"They've gone," Dipper said. Since they were already hugging, he kissed Wendy before they broke apart.

Mabel popped up. "Yes! We've baited the trap! Now let's plan our ambush! The attic closet's empty, isn't it, Broseph?"

"Except for the Invisible Wizard," Dipper said.

Mabel grinned. "Meh, he's a gentleman. We won't tell Abuelita he's there, and she'll never know."

Wendy stared at her. "Mabes, have you ever  _seen_ the Invisible Wizard?"

Mabel blinked. "Huh? No! What would be the point?" she asked.

"Then how do you know there's one in the closet?" Wendy asked.

"Ask Grenda," Mabel replied, with a mysterious smile.

* * *

Twice more they spotted the glowing orbs—three the first time, five the second—and twice more they went through variants of the same script. At twilight, Soos looked out the window and whistled. "Dudes! There's like a bruma convention! It looks like a crowd of tourists on July third out there!"

That was an exaggeration, but they spotted maybe twelve, maybe twenty, of the glowing balls of light milling around, not visible when they sailed out in the full light of the sky, but clear when they were in shadow. They seemed to be waiting for something, maybe nine o'clock.

"Eight-forty-five!" Mabel announced, glancing at the grinning cat clock on the wall. "Our equipment is ready! Cast, to your places! Go, go! Everybody—to your post!"

"I hope this works," Dipper muttered as he climbed the stair toward the attic.

Behind him, Wendy said teasingly, "Yeah, dude, 'cause if it doesn't—we gotta strip and make love!" He froze in mid-step, but then she patted his butt. "Just messin' with you, man! Let's go."


	10. Feliz Para Siempre

**Telenovela**

**By William Easley**

**(August 11, 2015)**

* * *

**10: Feliz Para Siempre**

_Might as well give them a little pre-show,_ Wendy thought to Dipper.

They sat on his bed up in the attic—unusually clean and tidy, because Soos had taken his job as floor manager seriously—embracing and nuzzling. She threw her head back and Dipper kissed her throat. He felt her pulse, beating faster than he would have thought.

— _I shouldn't be, but I'm getting all excited,_ Dipper confessed telepathically.

 _Mm, I'm kinda worked up, too! I love the way you nip and flick your tongue._ Wendy squirmed, sighing in a very realistic manner. "Turn the light down," she murmured.

Dipper reached over and dialed the electric lantern down to a soft, romantic glow. Wendy stood and after a peek at the floor, crossed to her first mark. "Oh, Dipper," she said in a quavering, romantic tone, her arms crossed and hands grasping her biceps, "this is so  _wrong_  of us! I know we have the strong biological urges common to teenagers everywhere, but dare we cross this line? We promised we'd wait until we're married!"

Dipper rose and followed her. He embraced her from behind. He was so tall now that, by stretching a little, he could rest his chin on her shoulder, his cheek touching hers. "I know," he said softly into her ear. "But we are both mature for our ages, and both want this so badly. I'm not yet old enough to marry you legally, but I will be sixteen in just a few days! When our love is eternal, what are two years, my sweetheart?"

"Yes! So true! I cannot resist your manly charms any longer!" Wendy turned and put her arms around him. She nibbled his ear and thought to him,  _I count fourteen. Suppose that's all of them?_

He thought to her: — _Better go on for a few minutes to be sure. There may be latecomers._

_OK, but promise me one thing. Please, please don't let Mabes script our wedding night!_

Dipper almost lost it, but with a heroic effort kept himself from laughing. — _Agreed!_

Locked in their embrace, they turned a slow circle on the floor, hitting their marks. It was almost like a warm, embracing dance, except all around them glowed the OB-servers, intruding strangers in the night.

Wendy gave him a tender, lingering kiss. _Dip, they're really interested in us. But I'm surprised we're getting away with this. Won't the future guys know this is what happened?_

— _Actually, we're creating a branch off the time line. Blendin operates outside the normal flow. His alerting us will let us change the present, and that will let us change the future. If it goes right. Mm. Peppermint?_

They held each other tightly. Her breasts pressed distractingly soft against his chest, and her tongue tasted sweetly spicy.  _Hey, long as we're forced to go through this, I'm gonna squeeze what enjoyment I can out of it!_ But Dipper could tell she was just teasing him, and that her feelings had become as heated as his.

— _Fine, but I'm gonna be a total wreck after._

_Mm, me, too. I'll treat you to a mental make-out session. We'll need to release some . . . tension. We'll just need to find a place to be alone before I gotta get back home. Unbutton my shirt._

Dipper's fingers felt clumsy as he undid the buttons on Wendy's green-plaid flannel shirt, one by one, slowly. She had a hand on the back of his neck, the other around his waist, as she leaned backwards and squirmed against him, a dreamy smile on her face.

— _So? Any news?_

_Yeah, one more just came in. Fifteen now. Two more minutes, and if no others show up, that's probably it. It's five past nine already. Take my shirt off._

He slipped the garment off her shoulders and let it drop to the floor. He held her bare arms, regretting that his palms felt sweaty. She slid her warm hands beneath his tee shirt and ran them over his bare chest while he nuzzled her throat. They continued that slow, seductive kind of dance step to music only they could hear, moving from mark to mark, and both of them looked around through squinted eyes. The attic was dark enough so the faint glows showed up pretty clearly.

— _I make it fifteen, too._

Wendy stepped back from him, a wicked grin playing over her lips as she reached with crossed arms to the hem of her undershirt, as though she were on the verge of pulling it up and off.

"You ready for the next step, Big Dipper?"

"Are you, my beautiful Wendy?"

"Yes! Yes, my love!" Then, as if in the throes of ecstasy, she threw her head back and shouted, _"Now_!"

The orbiting lights crowded in close, as if wanting to catch every second of what was unfolding.

But when Wendy shouted, the closet door opened silently, and Abuelita, a determined frown on her face, stepped out.

She carried a powerful canister vacuum in her left hand, the vacuuming wand in her right. With a practiced flip of her thumb, she turned on the suction.

Five of the lights had been sucked up before the others were aware and started to panic. They zipped around fast.

But not as fast as Abuelita. As each bruma strove to dive through the crack beneath the bedroom door, she flicked the vacuum wand as though it belonged to a Hogwarts master, and  _blip!_  the bruma vanished, the victim of a powerful air current. Six, nine, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen—

"Is all!" Abuelita said.

"That's it!" Wendy yelled. "Got 'em all! The bag!"

Abuelita popped the canister open and took out the sealed bag, which heaved and bulged as the brumas tried to escape their dusty prison.

"Two minutes and ten seconds until they time-travel!" Dipper said. "Let's go!"

He took the vacuum bag from Abuelita and he and Wendy sped down the stairs. Mabel and Soos held the door open, and they dove out into the twilight.

"Hurry, Dip!" Wendy yelled. "A minute and fifty-eight seconds!"

Dipper had run fast in his track meets, but he outdid himself. He tore past the pig pen with Wendy close on his heels. He cut through the dew-slick grass, straining for a personal best. He came within sight of the goal—

And his toe caught on a root!

He went sprawling, tumbling, taking a jolting spill in the grass. "Got it!" Without even slowing, Wendy had scooped up the vacuum bag like a football player recovering a fumble. Dipper pushed himself up, found he was unhurt, scrambled to his feet, and ran behind her. "Time!" she yelled.

He quickly checked his watch. "Fifty seconds!"

Wendy leaped the low fence, drew back, and spiked the bruma-laden bag—

Directly into the Bottomless Pit.

Then she flailed her arms, losing her balance. "Whoa!"

"Got you!" Dipper had dived through the fence rails, and stretched out on his stomach, he grabbed Wendy's left arm as she plunged. He quickly bent his leg, hooking his calf behind the fence rail, and took the hard jolt without losing his hold on her. But his hand and her wrist were slippery with sweat, and he was losing her.

"Dude, help!"

"I got you," he repeated, locking fingers with her and reaching down with his left hand to grasp her left wrist. "Don't worry, even if you fall in, you'll pop out again after twenty-two boring minutes—"

Mabel clambered through the fence and grabbed Wendy's right hand. Then Soos was there, hauling all of them up and away from the edge. Wendy popped over the lip of the Pit on her stomach, gasping for air as she lay on the grass with her legs dangling. Then Dipper and Mabel pulled her clear and helped her up and over the fence, and at last they all stood safe, the odd, bleachy scent of crushed grass in their nostrils. "Whoosh!" Wendy said. "Thought I was a goner! Did we make it in time?"

"Yeah, we did!" Dipper grabbed her in a bear hug, lifted her off her feet, spun her around once, and kissed her. "Thanks to you grabbing the bag after I dropped it!"

"We didn't see any of them get away," Mabel said. "Do you think they'll pop out again?"

"No," Dipper said, setting Wendy down and trying not to grunt. "They're mechanical devices. Grunkle Ford says that only living creatures come back out."

"And they can't get to the future?" Mabel asked.

"Not now. Blendin said they have to have geographical bearings to make the time leap, and there aren't any bearings in the Bottomless Pit! It's nowhere as far as the normal universe is concerned. They'll never come out, and they're gone forever."

"Hope we got, like, all of 'em," Soos said, turning on a flashlight. "Dawg, your leg's bleeding!"

"Just a scratch," Dipper said, realizing that his jeans leg had ripped and that warm blood was dripping down his thigh. But now that he was aware of the injury, he limped a little. They helped him back into the Shack, Abuelita brought iodine and bandages, and he winced as they patched up a two-inch-long cut above the knee on the outside his left thigh, bloody but not deep, where he must have hit the same root or a similar one when he fell.

"Turn out the lights," Wendy said.

In the darkness, they gazed all around.

No floating blue glimmers.

"Think we did it, guys," she said, and Soos turned the lights back on. With a sigh, Wendy added, "Abuelita, now you can see your telenovelas in peace!"

" _Gracias_ ," Rosa Ramirez, Mistress of the Vacuum, said softly, with a wistful smile. "But it will seem so dull now, watching a telenovela, after having lived in one!"

* * *

And that was very nearly the end of the adventure. Not quite, but very nearly.

Late that same night, as she lay asleep in her room, Abuelita had a wonderful dream.

 _Maybe_  it was a dream.

She heard someone softly call her name, and when she opened her eyes, she smelled the sweet aroma of roses, and there stood in her room at the foot of her bed a shining figure. He wore goggles and a silvery suit and white boots, he had attractive brown hair parted in the center, and he shone like clear moonlight. "Are you a ghost?" she asked, curiously not even a little afraid.

In a high-pitched but soothing voice, the visitor said, "No, dear l-lady, I-I-I'm, uh, an angel!"

" _Es verdad_? You do not look like how I picture an angel."

The figure shrugged but did not stop smiling. "Well, you kn-know, there are all kinds of a-angels. I'm the kind that brings you a r-reward. You did a wonderful thing tonight."

" _De nada_. It was only, the lights, they were bothering me as I tried to watch television. I guess I am getting old and what you say, cranky."

The angel took something off his belt and held it out. "Just hold s-still a moment." The device, whatever it was, hummed and then lit up with red lights. He studied it. "There. I thought so. I see your heart is getting tired. Is that r-right?"

Abuelita sighed. You could conceal things from your own family, but you could not hide a secret from an angel. "Yes. The doctor says it will not last very many months. The doctor can do nothing to help me."

With a broad, understanding smile, the angel replied, "No, he can't. He's wrong, though. I-I-I mean, I understand what he told you.  _He_  can't help you. But an  _angel_  can bring you a m-miracle.  _Verdad_?"

"That is true," Abuelita said humbly. "But me, I have done nothing to deserve a miracle."

"Yes, you have. And you're a woman of strong faith. And you love your family so much. Would you like to stay around longer than a few more months? Would you like to have enough good years to see all of your great-grandchildren born? Know how the real-life telenovela of Wendy and Dipper ends? See the beautiful things in store for Mabel?"

"Of course I would," Abuelita said with a sad smile. "All those would be very nice."

"And if you do gain those years, it won't disturb the f-future at all," the angel said. "I checked. Very w-well. Just lie r-real still, now. This treatment won't be available to m-most people for another five hundred years, b-but we all agree—all of us angels, I m-mean—that yours is a s-special case. Just take one deep breath, relax, and lie very still. This won't hurt."

The angel aimed a device at her, and a heavenly, golden light surrounded Abuelita. For a few moments she felt as if she were in the happiest of dreams. She saw her dead daughter Linda again, but she was alive and smiling, and she saw Soos on the day he was born, a fat fine baby, and she relived the happy day when his kind boss Mr. Pines made him the proud new Mr. Mystery. And inside her chest, she felt her heart grow warm and strong.

The light faded. The angel came to stand beside her and asked a little anxiously, "D-Do you feel all right?"

"I feel wonderful!" she said, sitting up in bed. "Like I could vacuum all day and not get tired!"

The angel took her hand and bent his head to give it a courtly kiss. "B-bless you always, you w-wonderful lady. G-go and visit your doctor. Let him do his tests. He will t-tell you that a miracle has occurred. I've g-got to leave now, but you have y-yourself a long, happy l-life, Rosa Alzamirano Ramirez. You've earned it!"

"No," she murmured, lying down again and slipping back into sleep. "No. I just did what any good Abuelita would do . . .."

In the morning she woke barely able to remember the details of the dream, except the miracle part. But she felt great. In fact, she had more energy than she had felt in two or three years, and she got up early, happily humming the song about the little chicks, and prepared an enormous breakfast. Soos came in, kissed her cheek and said, "Abuelita, you don't have to do this! You should get your rest!"

"Nonsense. I feel fine," she told him. "And I wanted to surprise the family!"

Wendy and Dipper came in, shiny with sweat and laughing after their run. "Mm!" Wendy said, licking her lips. "Smells great! Thanks, Abuelita! Let's grab our showers, Dip! This is making me hungry!"

Dipper, his bandaged leg a mild reminder of last night's adventures, said, "Cool!" He paused and to Abuelita, he said, "We couldn't have done it without you. Thanks, Abuelita—you got 'em all. You're the best!"

"Best cook!" Mabel announced, bouncing in. "Yum! Frittatas! Sopapillas! Hey, Dippingsauce, better hurry with that shower, or I won't leave you a bite!"

And Melody and the kids were awake and came in smiling, and a few minutes later the Stanleymobile pulled into the parking lot and a laughing Stan and Ford helped their wives out, and they all came inside, and—

There was more than enough great food to go around, and soon everyone was laughing and talking and it was like a party. And Abuelita felt like a queen.

You know what they say. Good food and good friends make good times.

Yeah. Very good times indeed.

* * *

_The End_


End file.
